


Kenopsia

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Cruelty, Docking, First Time, Fluff, Happy Ending, Kissing, M/M, Mentions of Rape, Oral, Violence, mentions of cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-05-21 05:58:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 15
Words: 73,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6040816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“You saved my life,” the young man says, pursing his lips as he swallows before relaxing them again. “Thank you.”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Will nods, once and firm. Whether the motion’s seen or not doesn’t matter, and Will for a time says nothing more at all. He watches as heaving breaths still their shaking and settle low and slow. The man’s not much older than he is, if he is at all. <i>Boy</i>, Will’s father called him, and so is this one.</i>
</p>
<p>An apocalypse AU following two lost boys, a few tough clans, and life after a catastrophic Event.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to our amazing beta [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!! We couldn't do this without you!

Will knows the sound of a rabbit’s deathful scream.

He knows the shrill keening of a fox caught in a trap.

He knows the flat report of a gunshot and he knows the ringing clatter of antlers smashing together during rut and he knows that a dead branch cracking echoes longer still.

This is the latter. There’s not enough birds left here to take flight but he watches as the black mass of one slips by overhead, through the spindling limbs of trees laid so heavy with leaves their branches bow. It’s not uncommon in late summer for a tree to get so laden that a rotted old branch snaps. It’s not uncommon at all.

But it’s damn uncommon to hear the voice of a man other than his own.

And it’s rarer still to hear another human shout in a place that’s meant to be for Will alone.

He squints upward and with his dirt-dark fingers spread marks a line directly ahead from whence that bird flew. Knife smacking against his hip, he slips and skids across slimy roots gorged fat on summer rain. His boots’ new soles work a wonder on soft unsteady soil so long as he moves quickly enough, quickly enough not to miss a step and strike himself down and quickly enough that he doesn’t lose the rhythm his feet find when his poorly eyes fade the trees to blurs of brown dripping moss and bark from their bodies.

A flash of copper under his eyes stops him with fingers tearing moist against the tree beside. He steps around the water, watching close for the isles of dense lichens that bely the soil beneath. There’s another holler and he tilts his head, following the echo backward and onward and then he sees him.

How could he not?

Thrashing about like that, splashing water everywhere and struggling. He’s making enough noise to wake the endless dead and enough movement to draw every goddamn gator in the region to him. Will sets his hand against his blade but does not yet draw it out.

He watches, and stands silent as the trees.

He cannot tell from the voice how old or young the man is. He can only tell that were he standing, he would be a little taller than Will himself, perhaps by a head, maybe just a little more. His limbs twist inelegantly through the thick marsh he’s trapped in, seeking as one would in water for resistance to allow him to drive his body free. 

Swamps aren’t as kind as still waters. They take masochistic pleasure in sucking down a body the more it moves. It gives just false hope of escape, with every squelch, every freed inch of body that allows air into the airless midst before the vacuum grows stronger still and pulls more insistently at the poor thing thrashing within it.

Will has wondered many times if in this new world the marsh has not become its own starving beast.

The man calls again, just one hand free now, just the top of his blonde head, hair remarkably clean compared to the mess around him, and his voice sounds weaker, sharper and higher. Panic, Will recalls, he’s hearing panic.

It’s been a damn dog’s age since he’s heard another voice at all, thank God.

It’s been a far sight longer since he’s heard such aimless alarm as all this. For a moment he’s frozen by it, stunned by the raw fear that penetrates this place’s peculiar quiet. For a moment more, he’s as fearful of it as this man is the imminent death swelling thick against his mouth and curling his guttural groans to a grotesque burble.

Will sucks in a breath, because he can. Because he’s not the fool who’s got himself stuck in a swamp. Because that’s not his body pent up in perdition. Thank God, thank God for that.

He nearly chokes on the next breath he takes, as stagnant sour water funnels down his throat, filling his belly and squeezing lungs. His ankle’s stuck, turned under a renegade root drove down into the sucking mud beneath. How long has he survived to succumb to this, of all the terrors in the world?

Will knows the danger.

Will knows the risk.

But what’s a drowning man going to do if he can’t even make his way in the swamp without getting himself killed? Draw a knife, try to gut someone whose head isn’t swimming as brown and murky as the water that’s weighted down his body? Damned if Will’s gonna be taken down by a man half-dead.

Damned if he’s gonna let a man die as ignominious as this.

“Hey!” he shouts, his own voice enough to startle him to movement like a spooked deer. He slides across a low-slung branch wide across as his own body and trips nearly into the same slick mud divot dug out by the heel of the man as he slipped into the swamp. Will lays flat across his belly and throws his hand out, breath jerking curt when hard fingers grab him by his wrist.

The grip is strong, at least, in desperation or genuine strength Will doesn’t know or care. Will pulls. He pulls enough so that when he reaches around the branch with his other hand he can grasp the wrist of the hand that holds so tightly to his own. So tangled, they both work, Will pulling and the man relaxing, to no longer tempt the swamp with his struggles.

Will grits his teeth when the man parts his filthy lips to breathe again, coughing up mud and murk from where they started to crawl down his throat. Sweat drips from Will’s brow by the time the man’s other arm comes free with a squelch from the marsh surrounding him. He murmurs something, his voice rough and throat sore from the mess he’d had to swallow. Will doesn’t listen, he adjusts his grip and keeps pulling. The man shakes his head and opens his eyes, dark as the swamp he’s trapped himself in, wide with fear and a strange recognition. Perhaps he has not seen another person for a long time either. Perhaps he had not expected anyone to help.

Will hadn’t expected to be helping.

“Grip this here branch,” Will mutters. “Hold onto it. When I crawl back, climb after. Follow.”

The man nods. Will nods back. He helps him secure his hands around the thick slippery branch and starts to slide himself back from whence he’d come, alternatively looking over his shoulder and down at the man to see if he’ll follow.

This time, he does draw out his blade. Heavy in his hand, honed sharp just that morning. It’s meant for many things - cutting off the confines of the traps he sets, slitting throats cleanly and efficiently, dressing the animals he catches and more.

But just as swiftly as it ends their struggle, so too could it end this one if forced.

For all it’s worth, Will hopes his hand is not.

He watches the thin, tall body pull itself free from torment. He watches it emerge like the little moths do from their cocoons, wriggling free and wet before spanning their frail wings to dry them. Each and every one Will hopes does not fly so close to his lamps that they burn themselves up and fall with a too-quiet click to the rotted wood porch.

He waits to see this one stretch itself gasping against the ground, wrought free and suffering in the reality of its own continued existence.

“You alright?” Will calls out, squinting.

The man coughs again, that heavy retching sound Will knows only too well. He heaves against the ground until more of the filthy water and sludge comes up and then he presses his just-as-filthy hand against his mouth to feel his breath against his palm. After a moment he nods, a slow and unsteady thing, before lifting his face to Will back up in the trees.

“I’m alive,” he amends, swallowing and frowning when the harsh-tasting liquid slinks down his throat with his spit. He takes a few moments more to catch his breath, showing no inclination at all to reach for Will or harm him. And then he shakes his head and turns to lie on his back, eyes closed and handprint smeared against his chin as he parts his lips to breathe.

“You saved my life,” he says, pursing his lips as he swallows before relaxing them again. “Thank you.”

Will nods, once and firm. Whether the motion’s seen or not doesn’t matter, and Will for a time says nothing more at all. He watches as heaving breaths still their shaking and settle low and slow. The man’s not much older than he is, if he is at all. _Boy_ , Will’s father called him, and so is this one.

He turns the knife in his hand and hesitant, stopping and starting, finally sheathes it in the worn leather holster at his hip. It’s a relief to feel its weight slip heavy from his fingers. It’s a relief too to know it’s close at hand should saving a life prove a need to defend his own.

Will knows, in that way he knows things without any reason to know them, that he won’t need to draw it again any time soon. Before him this haggard creature lays in threadbare cotton shirt and pants, one shoe lost to the swamp. It could be worse. He was going to lose a damn sight more than that.

Still Will feels a bit for him, having lost it. He feels a bit for the tidy blonde hair mucked and muddied. He feels a bit for the flinch as the man lifts a knee and finds his ankle wanting for strength.

He steps a little closer, a single stride. “What are you doing out here?”

The other merely drops his hand above his head and tries to stretch his foot again, tentatively and slowly, like he’s felt this pain before and has similarly walked free of it later. He keeps his eyes down before he manages a shrug, brief and almost angry.

“A good a place as any to be,” he says. “I don’t even know where ‘here’ is, I just kept walking.”

“From where?”

The young man points, vaguely south, then turns his hand east before dropping it again. He makes that strange shrugging motion with his shoulders again and sighs. “Home,” he says.

It’s as good an answer as any, really. Will wouldn’t know much beyond the land he keeps and that into which he ventures. It’s been his home for his eighteen years, near as he can mark them anyway. And it’s this precisely which concerns him to have found someone either daring or stupid or maybe both to go wandering into the swamps.

“You come from people?” Will asks. “Your home, you’ve got people there?”

The man stills for a moment and then continues to slowly try to stretch out the twist in his ankle, lips turning in a wince of pain. When he shakes his head it’s brief and decisive, eyes focused only on his foot, brow furrowed as much in pain as in concentration.

“Not anymore.”

“Nobody.”

“No.”

Will swallows hard and knits his brow, watching the unsteady movements, taut now not with fear but with a quiet suffering. Will has watched creatures like this, little birds with broken wings bravely fluttering across the dusty soil and deer limping wincing without weight on a wounded leg. He has ached for them, as he aches now in watching this boy so much like himself hiss as he drags his knee high with white-knuckled hands.

It’s hardly his ankle bent that causes all his pain.

“So you just set out wandering,” Will says. The moss-soft soil squishes beneath his boots as he comes close enough to reach were he to endeavor to do so. “It’s unusual to see someone else around here. Anywhere around, but here precisely.”

“I guess I figured if I walked long enough I’d find them,” the young man admits, straightening his leg and sighing before pushing himself up on his elbows to sit up. “They just… left one day. Gone. No note, no nothing. No footprints, no clues. One moment they’re there, the next it’s like they never were.” He pauses, mouth open as though to continue but he decides against it, frowning a little before lifting his eyes to Will again where he stands.

“If it’s so unusual, why were you wandering around here?”

Will sets his jaw and sterns his brow. He relaxes his hand from the hilt of his knife as acquiescence but keeps his fingers close regardless. There’s being polite, and there’s being unreasonable. There’s trying to understand and there’s being a fool.

He’s made it this far without falling to the latter, and he won’t allow any amount of sympathy for broken birds to sway him now.

“I heard you shout,” Will says, “so I came.”

The other boy makes a scoffing sound and Will frowns a little more. “That means you were already here,” he says.

“That’s not your concern. Can you stand? If you can, then you’d best be on your way,” Will says.

He says it because it’s the truth, the best option for them both. To meet in passing and share an exchange, and continue on with the concordance of distance placed betwixt them. A reminder to both that they will carry to know what it means to feel a life come precariously close to conclusion; a necessary space to preserve their safety.

He says it because it’s the truth, but despite all of that, it’s a strange pain to imagine meeting another after so long and seeing them go. He wants something to remember, when again there is little more to listen to but the shuffling of willow branches and the whisper of swamp grass. Something to bear in mind when winter runs thinned supplies leaner still.

Will offers him a hand, should he desire it, to help him to his feet. “What’s your name?”

The young man looks up. There is no point in hiding secrets from ghosts. No one who would look for him, no one who would recognize him. No one left, as far as Will is concerned, but the two of them here. He feels his heart beat a little quicker as the man reaches for his hand, but he stops, considers his own palm, and wipes it against the dry moss beneath himself before holding it out to Will again.

“Hannibal,” he says, gripping Will’s hand tighter for when Will helps to pull him up. It takes a few struggling tries but Hannibal stands, and he holds Will’s hand a moment more before nodding in gratitude. “My name is Hannibal.”

"Will," he answers.

Hannibal tips a nod towards him in understanding.

Will's hand heats fire-warm where it was held, nevermind the sluice of swamp-water on them both. How long has it been since he's touched another person? Years and years. The civility of the scene sharpens his senses, keenly seeking towards the source of strangeness beyond the oddity of contact.

It's not impossible that he - this Hannibal - was heading elsewhere and took a wrong turn. Will's all too aware of how one can get lost in these woods when the mists rise and the light strikes lines of golden illumination through the trees. The man's got no obvious weapons on his person, not even a bag - though from how he tilts his shoulders Will reckons that he did until the swamp took it from him. He seeks just past the man's eyes like swamp maple leaves in flux from summer to fall, so brown they're damn near red.

"I had some things," Hannibal begins, and Will jerks his chin upward.

"Swamp got them," Will finishes for him, and Hannibal hums. "Figured. Can you walk? Be good to move on past here after all that noise."

Hardening his jaw, Hannibal leans his body forward to set weight upon his ankle. It holds, there's no wet crunch of broken bone thrown asunder, but it's as tenuous a thing as had been his hold to life moments before. Hannibal fights not to let the pain show but his cheeks chill as the color runs from them.

"No good, huh?" Will asks.

He could leave him, now. Let him figure himself out. Accept the moment as an entirety, beginning and middle and end, and think no more of the flaxen-haired boy with whiskey-dark eyes.

Without food or blanket.

With a bum ankle that'd be assuredly better with a couple days rest.

He should leave him now and protect what he has. Inviting guests invites trouble, that much Will knows for a certainty. But he thinks of the little birds struggling valiantly against their own inevitable demise. He thinks of Hannibal trying to make his way from the swamp before disease or hunger or gators or worse find him, and everything in Will all at once revolts.

He refuses to name this feeling loneliness, and he calls it hospitality instead.

"You have any weapons on you?" Will asks. "Anyone else who was with you?"

"No," Hannibal says, though Will knew that to be true before he even spoke it.

"I have somewhere you can rest. Get on your feet again and go. I need to know you're not gonna make me regret this," Will says, "and I need you to understand what'll happen if you try."

Hannibal raises his eyes to Will again and regards him. He looks exhausted. Now that the adrenaline has filtered from his system he is again just a boy struggling to get somewhere - anywhere - other than where he was before. Neither have hope of an end goal. Neither have hope of finding some magical solution, because there isn’t one. The world, now, is silence and overgrown trees and mud.

There is nothing left to look for.

“I understand,” Hannibal says at length. “And I wouldn’t blame you.”

Will takes him in, in silence. Heart drumming steady he marches across the dismal black valleys circled beneath his eyes, and down the sun-scorched plains of his cheeks. He presses onward to his hair, a field of wild dry grass, downward to the sloping mountain ridge of his mouth. Nothing in this boy is wanting, and while Hannibal’s rubbed-raw nerves taste to Will as if he were chewing sharp metal, there is not the desperation nor elation Will has come to understand with the same wariness as he does an approaching wall of clouds spitting lightning towards the soil.

“Come on, then,” Will tells him, right hand against his blade as he turns to go back from whence he came. He daren’t touch Hannibal again, the heat of his hand was unbearable in its intensity, but he moves slowly. He winds past trees that Hannibal can grip to aid his limp like overgrown walking-sticks. He seeks out flatter earth once they put the marshes at their backs.

Slowly, they make their way from the reeking marshes up to denser ground. Hannibal moves with a calm determination, though the pain on his face is palpable he makes no sound and shakes his head gently when Will offers his arm for him to lean on. As much pride as it is survival, knowing that if you can’t make your way on your own, you won’t get farther than your body will carry you; like baby animals born in the mess of all of this, learning to walk within moments. Because there’s no other choice. Because the parents might not live long enough to even wean their young properly.

Will helps as much as he can regardless, clearing the path with a swipe of his muddy boot, holding back branches until Hannibal has passed through so they don’t lash against his cheeks. They remain silent, Will because he has nothing else he could ask, Hannibal to keep the sounds of pain behind his lips. 

The house is hardly what the name implies, on the outside. Would hardly do for someone to stumble on it and decide they want it more than Will, who has kept himself safe within it for years. It looks like a fallen tree, like some corrugated iron, like smears of muck and filth with animal tracks and deep dug gouges. It looks like nothing at all. Will leads Hannibal around to the side, where some rubbish lays piled in seemingly no order at all. But slowly, with every tug and turn of an old refrigerator door, a window frame, another branch with clinging vines, an opening is made visible. Hannibal is motioned inside.

Will fights down his snarling gut instinct to shove right after him, to squirrel away his belongings and keep them safe from roving hands that in their capabilities include warming Will’s palm like sun and throwing sparks like firewood logs against his fingers. Instead he stands, a moment more. Head tilted towards the wind, and then away from it. Tall grasses hiss dry in what little breeze exists, and there is no sound but for they and the call of a crow, no doubt come to seek out what remained of the hapless creature in the swamp.

The hapless creature that drops heavy with a groan against a dry packed earth floor.

There is a mattress here, dirty where its plastic grew brittle and withered. There is a pile of clothes and numerous tools, some obvious in their usage and others arcane and forgotten. One never knows when they’ll find the right problem for a tool to fix, and keeping any things that seem of potential worth comes naturally now to everyone. Hannibal sees now the gas lamps outside the shelter, the carefully placed wooden boards that lay before what’s considered a door.

He notes too the food, dried meat in strips across a rafter-branch and plants turned upside down, both medicinal and culinary. Silver glints against his eyes with a familiarity he has to fight against indulging in, cans of food as attractive to those remaining as corpses are to crows. Remnants of lives once lived, distorted from their past reality. As the faces of the dead fade so do the facades of cheerful mascots on peeling labels.

There is a shotgun in the corner.

“You can take the mattress,” Will says, wary. “Don’t take anything but that unless you let me know first your intentions. I’ll share what I can. I’ve got water and some food. I can tell you where to wash up if you’re keen to do so - there’s a little spot where the snakes don’t go.”

“Why?”

Will blinks at him.

“Why don’t they go there?”

“Hell if I know. I’m just glad they don’t. Gators are monstrous but the snakes are what’ll kill you. That or the swamp,” he adds, with a snort.

Hannibal’s lips quirk in a smile. He shifts and turns his head towards the mattress, brows furrowing before he turns back to Will.

“I might need to,” he apologizes. “I don’t want to mess the mattress you have, since you’ve kept it so clean. And all I have, now, is the stuff you dragged me out of the swamp in.”

Will snorts, giving Hannibal another once-over from top to toe. “You might need another boot.”

“You have somewhere I can find one?”

“We can see what the swamp coughs up,” Will shrugs. He reaches into the complex tangle that is the ceiling and finds a rough grey towel that has certainly seen better days. It’s remarkably clean regardless. “It isn’t far. After, we can hang your clothes to dry out so you have something to crawl back into once you’ve slept most of the walk off.”

Hannibal nods his head in thanks, and steels himself to get up again, holding his breath as he does. A swift arm outflung with a grunt of pain is quickly caught by Will, and he ducks beneath it to ease the boy to his feet.

“Careful,” Will tells him. “Grab the wrong branch and you’ll pull the whole damn house down.”

It’s a real reason and a good excuse. There’s weakness in admitting need for assistance that beckons predators close. But everyone does want for help, now and then. Everyone needs a lucky break.

The least Will can do is make it a little less humiliating for Hannibal.

“I don’t mind,” he says, towel in one hand and the other arm around Hannibal. “Better you limp on me than twist the other one. A horse with one bum leg is still worth feeding. A horse with two bum legs is dinner.”

Hannibal laughs, just a brief huff of air, and leans on Will as they make their way from the little house and on towards a secluded part of the marsh. Will leads Hannibal the shortest way he can, without compromising his balance. Will found it by accident, almost as Hannibal had found the swamp, but this had been a far more fortuitous turn. He had fallen from a tree right into the little pool.

Now as they come upon it, Will smiles, remembering how proud he was of being able to find such a clean place to wash, such a safe place to sit and soak after hard days of scrambling over marshy branches trying to gather anything from mushrooms to swamp chestnuts to pieces of hapless animals not yet too revolting to save.

“I think something runs through the bottom of it,” Will says as they approach the lip of the bank. “A subterranean river or something. The water’s clean the next day no matter how murky I make it the night before.”

“Maybe that’s why the snakes can’t stay,” Hannibal considers. “They’d get swept away.”

Will peeks over into the water, hand firm against the other boy’s waist. “I suppose so. Can’t wriggle down into the mud. Or you can try, but -”

“Gone.”

With a hum, Will smiles a little. He’s glad, at least for now, that he saved this boy. He’s much better company than the animals Will hardly gets to greet before he has to quiet them. Much better company than the wrens and the warblers that titter at him as he passes. Whether he remains glad will, he figures, be seen in time. But for now there’s been no harm and neither any cause for alarm.

He turns his head away and tempers his smile, clearing his throat as he works himself free from beneath Hannibal’s arm. “You alright now?”

Stiffly, Hannibal nods, balancing well until he can lower himself slowly to sit, and work off his remaining boot. The leather curls dark against his leg, pried free from dirt-darkened skin. “Will you come in, too?”

“No,” Will says. Too much a risk, that, to leave himself bare and the house unattended. “No, I’ll keep watch and hang your clothes up while you’re in. Christ,” he mutters, when the fraying sock is peeled loose from Hannibal’s bad ankle.

It’s swollen and dark but no bone is shifted, nothing has pierced the skin. He is very lucky, they both know it. Carefully, Hannibal sets his clothes by the bank, motioning that he will wash them before passing them up. Trousers follow socks, pants follow those. His jacket is set to his other side, his sweater there as well, the shirt he has beneath piled in a loose and frayed pool on top of everything else. If he had scarves to cover his mouth and eyes from bad smells and sand, if he had gloves to help him grip and climb, if he had anything else, the swamp has taken it.

Without a word, and without any embarrassment regarding his bareness, Hannibal slips into the cool water of the little pool and with a breath sinks to the bottom of it.

Will watches the water murk a little as the young man runs his hands through his hair to free the mud and gunk from it. Will watches the water and hopes he doesn't have to dive in to save him when Hannibal stays down for longer than Will would ever be comfortable with. But then he’s up, drawing a free - and much cleaner - hand through his hair to slip it from his forehead.

He’s younger than Will had thought. A boy, certainly, perhaps still older than Will, but not by as much as Will had thought. He swallows. Hannibal reaches for the shore and drags his filthy shirt into the water first, scrubbing it against itself, gathering some silt from the bottom to rub between the fabric as well to dislodge the older stains. Only when he’s finished does he hand it back up to Will, and take the sweater to clean next.

Will takes each piece one at a time back across the field. He hangs them over a bower that will catch sun for most of the day, but exists low enough to not be seen from a distance. By the time one is hung and Will returned, the next is ready. Halfway through their endeavor, Hannibal’s eyes lift from his work with the shadow of a smile.

“Are you sure you won’t just wait? Won’t it be easier?”

“I like the walk,” Will tells him. He doesn’t tell him that he likes just as much the sensation of coming back to another person waiting for him, and one that seems for now at least to have no intention of trying to open his belly. He takes up Hannibal’s trousers and wrings them out as he walks.

“You’ve been here a while,” Hannibal asks, when Will returns. His shoulders are pinkening already from the sun, glistening with clean, clear water.

Will thinks back through the winters and shrugs a little. “Three years nearly.”

Hannibal whistles lowly, passing his socks up last and watching Will go before sinking below the water again to wash himself and luxuriate in the pool for as long as he can. When Will returns, Hannibal’s head is above the water again, arms crossed and chin resting atop them on the bank.

“Three years is a long time,” he says.

“They blur into each other I guess,” Will shrugs. “I can’t remember one winter from another. All are cold. Few have plentiful things to hunt.”

“The nightmares all become the same, after a while,” Hannibal agrees. “I was at my home many years, almost twelve, I think, before they just -”

Disappeared.

Whoever they were, whoever they had been to him, they had disappeared. Hannibal shrugs.

“Why here?”

“Why not?” Will asks, though with only enough rancor to make Hannibal smile. It works, and things feel a bit more even again. Will’s certain he’s smiled more today than he has in more time than he can recall. “We lived not far - a town about half a day’s walk or so, if you’re going slowly. I knew the area alright. Learned how not to fall into the swamp,” he adds, pleased when Hannibal grins at this too, his teeth a little crooked.

Will notices this.

He blinks a little, and shakes his head, settling to the edge of the pool, though his gaze spans the wide and desolate horizon. “Was it kin?” he asks, his turn it seems to do so. “That you were with before.”

Hannibal nods. “As much as I knew it to be, I suppose. Mother, father, little sister.” He trails off and Will watches his eyes glaze a moment before he blinks and he’s here again, no longer caught in the cobwebs of the middle distance.

“I lived with my dad,” Will says, and Hannibal’s eyes lift to his in silent apology.

He doesn’t ask what happened. Will supposes he doesn’t have to.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Already the boy is exhausted, from nothing more than pulling himself from a swamp and attempting to deal with his sore ankle. Will would scoff if he wasn’t the same way years before when this all started. Moaning and moping when his father made him run, complaining when all they had was fish to eat._
> 
> _He learned quickly. He had no choice._
> 
> _Hannibal will learn too._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

“This will sound crazy,” Hannibal says after a while, shifting a little in the water, but enjoying the soaking until Will makes him get out. “But I didn’t think anyone else was… left. We’d never seen anyone, together, although our parents were always wary. For a long time I didn’t think there was anyone but us in the whole world.”

Will makes a sound, low in his throat, and watches the boy paddle slowly back and forth in aimless lines around the spring. It’s good to rest, when one can. Will rarely has the opportunity, too uneasy leaving his things unattended for something so unnecessary. But Hannibal’s ankle, swollen as it is, could use the cool water to ease its struggle.

“I can’t imagine how that must’ve felt,” he finally says. Then he shakes his head, dark curls spilling tangled against his brow. Of course he can imagine how it felt, when the only souls who mattered to you in the world were suddenly released. He knows how hollow one’s body grows when they are left alone.

He clears his throat. “So when you struck out,” Will asks, “you didn’t see anyone?”

“Not until you.”

This makes Will laugh, brow creased. It’s just a breath, sighed past his grin, and all of it swept away beneath the draw of his hand across his mouth. “Could’ve done much worse than a backwoods trapper,” he says. “There are others. Towns that keep to their own. Encampments. There are those that ain’t got a home at all, but those which they make on the road between places they can pillage. Not everyone means harm, but enough do that you wind up with folks like me, I imagine, who don’t see the reason to risk in any of it.”

“Why would people mean harm?” Hannibal asks, and Will’s reaction is enough to make Hannibal slip across to the bank again. “What’s wrong?”

Will blinks at the boy in the water as though he’s suddenly sprouted a second head, and then he laughs, a harsh and almost angry sound. Hannibal swallows and furrows his brow in confusion.

“What’s wrong?” Hannibal asks again.

“I don’t know what game you’re playing,” Will tells him. “But I can tell you I don’t like it.”

“No game,” Hannibal says. He scarce so much as lifts his fingers as Will’s attention snaps to them and brings them back down with no more force than the weight of his wariness.

“When you said you thought you were alone -”

“We were.”

“Where?”

“At home, before the pantries were finally emptied and the water tank dry. It was only then that we left.”

Will licks his lips apart and watches the strange boy before him, with his golden hair and smooth skin. He’s heard about them, the isolationists and the preppers. A hobby for the wearisomely rich and paranoid, tending the branches of infertile trees that despite their nature came to an unexpected ripening when it all happened.

They are whispered about, amidst those with a desperate gleam in their eye. The fattest fruit for the plucking, but thinning each day they were allowed to carry on as if the entire world hadn’t changed. Will stretches out a hand and Hannibal lifts his own. Will gathers his fingers close together and upturns his palm toward the sky. This is what Will felt when they shook hands. The callouses on Hannibal’s fingers are freshly made and tender pink, the result of ripping apart innocent skin in unfamiliar new activities.

“You’d not left your house,” Will asks, careful now, “in how long?”

Hannibal frowns. “Years,” he says softly. “As long as we could. One day, my father just forbade me to go outside and after that we didn't leave it. My sister was born at home.”

Will blinks and then gently lets go of Hannibal’s hand. The young man sets both to the bank and hoists himself up to sit on it instead, water dripping down his shoulders, on to his chest and lower still. He keeps his feet in the little pool for now.

“We had books and power and food. Water we got from a huge tank out the back of the house, the rain would refill it. After Mischa was born, I wasn't allowed to talk about the outside, we pretended like nothing was there at all. After a while there wasn't.” Hannibal swallows, lifts his eyes to Will. “Is that strange?”

Will watches him - just past him, really, finding it as difficult now to meet his gaze as it was to take his hand again. Too much closeness in that contact, too much intimacy after so long without being anywhere near another person. And then he nods a little, because it is indeed strange, and they release their tension with a shared sigh of laughter.

“But,” Will says, “I’d rather have had all that and been ignorant to everything else, I think. It must have been a blessing not to know.”

“I still don’t,” Hannibal reminds him, and Will nods again, slower this time. He observes Hannibal’s toes as they rise from the water and slip beneath again, dark hair laid flat against his pale legs. He’s like someone from another time, missing all the scars and strident muscles pressing for escape from strife and hunger. Preserved as the mannequins in the windows of shops, stripped bare of their belongings but still posed perfectly.

How is Will, who’s yet to even finish checking his traps for the day, meant to describe all that’s gone on in the last dozen years?

How can he hope to convey the riots and the raids, the roving gangs and secured settlements, the hunger and the exhaustion that plagues every movement he makes, each and every one calculated and considered so as not to expend any more energy than he can afford?

He wanted to spend his free time today girding the run-down leather on his boots, with some scraps of hide he’d tanned and tempered.

He doesn’t imagine he’ll have much time for that if he’s got to talk about how any world Hannibal once knew is so far gone as to be a yellowing and brittle memory.

“Come on,” Will says to him, turning away and shoving himself to stand. He takes up the towel and holds it for the boy, nevermind that the sun’s nearly dried him already. His other hand extends to help him to his feet. “Gonna need to wrap your ankle. You’ll not like me for a while when I do, but it’ll keep it from getting fragile.”

Hannibal snorts quietly but takes the hand and towel both, wrapping the thing around his waist. He finds if he sets his weight to his toes only, the going is easier, hardly faster but less painful. He hadn’t that chance when his foot was booted in the one shoe he has left. He follows Will back to the little house, smiles when he sees his clothes dripping in the sun.

“It’s silly, isn’t it?” he says. “How suddenly those are the entirety of my worldly possessions?”

Will regards him but doesn’t answer, helping him get back into his little shelter and onto the mattress. Already the boy is exhausted, from nothing more than pulling himself from a swamp and attempting to deal with his sore ankle. Will would scoff if he wasn’t the same way years before when this all started. Moaning and moping when his father made him run, complaining when all they had was fish to eat.

He learned quickly. He had no choice.

Hannibal will learn too.

“There’s a place not terribly far,” Will says, “that might still have some things left. I try not to go there unless it’s necessity, but it seems rare enough that anyone else does either. Might be worth the risk, once you can run again.”

“What is it?” Hannibal asks. “What’s there?”

“Just a shop, of sorts. One of those buildings where the trucks used to stop and get gas again. That’s all gone now, dried up when some fool left the caps open, but there’s a chance we could still find some things inside for you.”

Will watches Hannibal as he eases down to lay, groaning softly as the mattress’ wrapper crinkles under his back. Will often considers that plastic. He’d be more comfortable without it, and it’s not as if he’s in any need to make a good presentation to someone by keeping it clean. But it helps to minimize the mold that threads black through fabrics after little time at all in the viscous air here, so he leaves it on.

He studies the boy - who nods his agreement - and the shape of his body. He’s got muscles curving under smooth skin, but they’re not the ropey tendons that hold together the vessel of Will’s own form. Hannibal seems softer, by compare to what Will feels in his body. He has hair on his chest, and just as much down further, where softly against his leg lies his cock.

Will sucks in a breath and ducks into the shack, seeking through his things for bandages, with which he absconded on his last venture out to the building previously described.

“You just gotta listen,” Will says. “More than anything else out here. Sound carries. Strangely, at times, but you’ll always hear another body who doesn’t know this place before you see them. Branches crackle. Water splashes. You learn to hear a muttering caught on the wind in a different way than you hear your own conversations inside. That’s the most important thing to know - listen, learn how to move quiet, and if you hear something, hide. Worst comes to worst, they find you but you’ve at least got the jump on them. Most times though they'll carry on by. Only fools wander into the swamp, so little will they imagine that you're there."

He sits down to the edge of the mattress, beige bandages in hand, and clears his throat with a gesture betwixt Hannibal’s foot and his own lap. Will’s not spoken so much in years. But like the little birds and the deer, like the moths emergent frail-winged and delicate, Will wants to make sure that this boy, this boy who’s no idea the hell that the world would lay upon him, survives longer than those creatures.

Hannibal winces as he sets his foot to Will’s lap, but he says nothing. He listens. He heard a lot while trudging from home, more than he had before. Sometimes birds, other times creatures he couldn’t identify. Too much sound to parse through, he doesn’t know how Will manages. But he supposes were Will faced with a translation from Latin to German, French or Lithuanian he may find himself similarly confused.

If only languages mattered anymore.

Hannibal considers that perhaps everything he had been taught to keep his curiosity away from outside was entirely useless. Meant to fill his mind so that he didn’t seek for anything more.

He makes a sound when Will touches his foot, twitching to draw it back, but he forces himself still.

Will unfurls the bandage, bottom lip licked between his teeth in concentration. It’s trickier to attend to this on someone else’s body, rather than his own. Hannibal chokes down another sound as Will lifts his foot just enough to slip the scratchy, stiff material beneath.

“It’s not bad, is it,” Will asks, and though he’s paled, Hannibal shakes his head. “Just you wait,” he adds, grinning crooked when Hannibal laughs and lays back, arm across his eyes. “So you knew what happened.”

“We knew. We just never spoke of it. And then we forgot, little by little.”

“So you missed the riots,” Will asks, hushing Hannibal when he makes another unpleasant sound. Will takes the opportunity to tug the bandage snug, and carries on his stalwart securing of unsteady bone as Hannibal hisses outward. Better than if he’d started yelling, anyway.

“There were riots?”

“At once,” he says. “The moment it happened, seemed like. And you missed the military, when the food shortages got bad.”

Another curt tug cuts tight Hannibal’s answer. He presses his hands to his face and holds out a harrowing hum against them, nodding and obeying as Will asks him to move his toes. They wriggle, and Will tucks the bandage’s end beneath the rest of itself. There’s a little metal clasp there, rusted now, but it holds well enough. He doesn’t yet make Hannibal move his foot. He sets a hand against his shin instead and drags his thumb along the bone, fingers gliding beneath to keep blood moving.

“It was quiet,” Hannibal recalls after a while, voice tight. “Where we lived, it was very quiet. After the neighborhood dogs stopped barking we didn’t hear much else beyond the wind passing by the windows. Couple months in, we started to board them up on the bottom floor.”

Will watches him, fingers gentle against his skin as he continues to rub there. He doesn’t want to tell Hannibal that he knows what that silence means, that he knows that feeling of hearing the silence grow and grow as animal after animal is sacrificed for humanity’s greed and hunger. He doesn’t tell him because he doesn’t need to know. It doesn’t matter now. It’s been years since Will has seen a dog.

That’s what happens when a creature trusts another too much.

“It must have been frightening,” Hannibal adds. “Living through that. I’m sorry.”

Will shrugs in acceptance, but not to dismiss the kind words that flourish within him like vines of honeysuckle, twisting sweetly around his bones. He shivers at their crawling, invasive and deep. He wants to feel it again.

“It was,” Will says, brow furrowed. “But after a time you forget how things used to be, before it happened. How bad it was just after. We managed. One finds a way, or they don’t, I suppose.”

He releases Hannibal’s calf, warmed by his fingers, and with a ginger grasp settles his foot back to the mattress and slips from beneath. On his knees he makes his way across the floor, free of rocks and roots after careful and constant combing. From where they rest glistening russet red over a dry branch, Will takes down a thread of muscle from some animal or another who did not manage well to avoid his traps. He drops back to sit on his bottom, cross-legged, beside his guest, and tears free a hunk of hare or nutria or squirrel to offer over.

Hannibal regards the offering and takes it out of politeness. He doesn’t put it in his mouth until Will’s done chewing most of his and raises an eyebrow in question. Then he laughs, another soft thing, and sets it between his teeth.

It’s rough and chewy, sharp with natural flavor and a little bit of salt. Hannibal can’t remember the last time he ate something that wasn’t a handful of berries from a bush he had passed, and this makes his mouth water, makes his jaws hurt as he keeps chewing until he can finally swallow. He’s damn near breathless by the end, and Will watches him with a raised brow, not being able to help laughing.

“Never had jerky before?”

“Not like that,” Hannibal tells him, drawing a hand over his lips to make sure he hasn’t made a mess. “That’s really good.”

Will tries to hide his pleasure behind a sweep of his hand, but it hardly suffices. Beneath his fingers heat spreads across his cheeks as it does after a day spent in the sun, tending the little bean plants that grow against the most lightful side of his abode. His cheeks ache from smiling; his throat rasps from so much speaking.

But he is utterly, insurmountably goddamn pleased that Hannibal enjoyed his jerky.

Will offers him half of what remains in his hand and lets himself forget the work that must remain undone for today, with the sun already smudging shadow across the swamps.

"What kind of things did you eat?" Will asks, gnawing off a piece of meat to settle against his tongue and softly suck, rather than gnaw. "When you were at your house."

Hannibal gratefully takes the jerky and follows Will’s suit to suck it, not attempt to grind through it. He settles on his side, sore foot stretched out and the other leg curled up. He moves the towel to cover himself for decency and warmth and considers the questions. They had eaten what Hannibal assumed everyone ate. He’s forgotten most, now, simply because he started to take it for granted.

“Rice,” he says. “We would cook a lot of rice and keep it for a long while, eating a small bowl at a time. In the morning we would put some canned fruit on it if we had any left. We had sauces and salt for lunch or dinner.” He takes a moment to gently chew against the piece of meat in his mouth and thinks further. “Some weeks we cooked pasta. Those were the easier weeks. Sometimes during the birthday weeks or Christmas weeks. Pasta and some canned meat or fish our parents had stored away. It was always so rich and filling, we would spend the entire week with sore stomachs and none of us would care. Buckwheat when the rice ran out. Semolina when the buckwheat went.”

Will’s stomach makes itself heard with a tremendous and torrential burbling, but he only notices it when Hannibal does, watching Will with an expression caught between amusement and apology.

“You’re lucky,” Will says, “to have had all that.”

To have had only a week at a time of hunger. To have been able to make it stop any time they wanted. To have space to keep it and protection from raiders.

“I didn’t know we were,” Hannibal admits. “I thought us to be in exile. Cast adrift from the rest of civilization, as it fell dark beyond our doors. And you were out here, the whole time.”

“Not out here, out here, but near enough.”

“I would have helped you,” he says, ardent in this before he tucks the bit of jerky to the other side of his mouth. “If I’d known.”

“But you didn’t, and you wouldn’t’ve,” Will reminds him. “I assure you, if you’d known what was happening out here, you’d as soon as shot me for darkening your doorstep.”

He means no ill-will towards the gesture but it doesn’t do anyone a damn lick of good to linger on what never could have been. Will sits back and brings up his knees, to remove his boots now that there’s more dark than light cast across the rafters. The leather strips of lacing slide free and Will groans to feel his feet relinquished from their grasp.

“Lost track of my birthday years ago,” he mutters, amused. “No reason to keep making calendars after the end of days, I suppose.”

“I think it’s the end of August,” Hannibal ventures, unsure himself. “We had a calendar, for a while we would redraw it to make the days match the new year. The pictures always stayed the same. A view of a beach none of us had ever visited. It was so faded by the end I think we only saw it because we had looked upon it so often and remembered,”

He chews a little before allowing the jerky to rest again, watching Will sit before him and turn his own piece in his mouth too.

“I’ll be eighteen next month,” Hannibal says.

The words fleck ember-hot as Hannibal speaks them, singeing Will with fire-bright memories. He hadn’t reckoned it to be so late in the year, if he’d reckoned at all. It brings Will suddenly into closer than comfortable proximity against winter. It’s worse up north, but over the years it’s gotten each time around colder than the one before. The birds leave. The insects quiet. It might remain mild or a cold snap could kill off what little plants Will has managed to convince to growth.

He shakes his head and clears the thoughts, smacking a mosquito against his neck and leaving his hand there to rest.

“I’m close to eighteen,” Will says, “give or take a bit. It’s sometime this year, anyway.”

He should have care not to trade information so readily. He should have care not to open up so much. Will thinks of the dogs, who trusted too easily and found themselves struck down for it and shifts uncomfortable from the consideration. Will would not have hurt a dog if one had found him. He’d not have eaten them. He’d have shared what he had, not much but more than many, he imagines, as he is now.

Maybe Hannibal feels the same towards him.

“Do your hands hurt?” Will asks. Hannibal starts to stretch them, where the callouses now dried pull stiff and threaten to tear and seep again. Will stops him, fingertips brushing together, and pushes to stand. Hannibal’s eyes widen in alarm but Will hushes him as he had in wrapping his ankle.

“I’ve got to get your clothes,” Will says. “And find a couple of things, before we lose the light. You alright for a bit?”

Hannibal nods, curling his fingers close again. Will checks his knife against his side, and after a moment’s hesitation, takes up the shotgun tilted into the corner, too. He slings it over his shoulder, its harness made from a simple rotted rope, and he ducks beneath the bower doorway as he goes.

How quickly Hannibal sleeps, he doesn’t know. But when he awakens, it’s with a violent start. Will hushes him, Hannibal’s hand in his own, seated beside him as if he’d never left. He’s wearing a soft and threadbare pair of sweatpants, their waist twice as big as his own but cinched tight, and a loose-fitted undershirt atop. Clean things, washed things, despite the inevitable stains and holes that come with existence.

Hannibal hisses as Will uncurls his hand, removing from his own mouth a chewed portion of leaves that he folds into Hannibal’s hand, laid sweetly smelling at the base of his fingers where the skin’s rubbed away worst.

“Keep that there,” Will tells him. “Give me your other hand.”

The lamp lit in the center of the floor burns stinking tallow into golden dim light. Hannibal’s eyes look to Will blacker than the star-laden sky outside, black as the waters now where the moon’s light does not paint them silver. He tucks the rest of the gummed-up parcel of sassafras against Hannibal’s other hand and closes his fingers over it to hold it in place.

Beside him, he sets a cup and a jug of water. Plastic, protected from the elements, suffers little so long as it’s kept from sun and crushing. Alongside that Will sets a stick, a little bigger around than a pencil.

“That’s for your teeth,” Will tells him. “Chew it up until the end frays, then it’s the same as a toothbrush. Wasn’t worth going back out to get another when I had to leave mine, but I remembered these from Boy Scouts and they work just fine to stop your gums from going bad.” He pauses, then adds, with sudden secret pleasure, “Plus they taste like root beer.”

Hannibal smiles, sharing that small delight with Will. He holds his hands clasped closed as Will had directed them, ignoring the sensation that comes from the chewed up leaves, how they will seep when inevitably he relaxes his hands in the middle of the night and smears the mess against himself and the mattress.

“I was never in Boy Scouts,” Hannibal admits. Will shakes his head, though he’s hardly surprised by the revelation. “I’ve only ever read about making fire with two twigs, or tracking by leaves or knowing how to look to the stars for directions. God, you must think me so useless,” Hannibal laughs. “I don’t blame you, I really am.”

Will laughs with him and shakes his head. “You’re not,” he assures him. “Really, you’re not. Ask me to live in a house with more than one person, where there is more food than I’ve ever laid my eyes on, and tell me I have to hold off eating all of it, and you’ll find me similarly at a loss.”

Hannibal’s smile is softer, accepting and kind in his gratitude. He doesn’t see his education, strange though it is, as anything but useless. It’s an entirely different world here. Yet to Will, his ability to be patient, to be hungry yet not raid a pantry filled with food, is something worth being proud of.

“I did sneak things out of the pantry once in a while,” Hannibal admits quietly, lifting his eyes to Will. “Dried fruits when we had them still. I would sneak some for my sister and me.”

“That seems alright,” Will says, as if to alleviate a guilt for something that has proved consequential only in providing a pleasing memory. “Is she much younger?”

“Half my age,” he says. Though Hannibal does not thank Will aloud for his generosity in tenses, he allows his shoulders to settle in gratitude instead. They are still out there, he has to believe. There’s no other way for them to be.

“What’s her name?”

“Mischa.”

“Strange. Pretty, though.”

“Lithuanian.”

“Is that the…” Will knows it’s rude to ask, somewhere distant and deeply ingrained in himself, so he simply motions towards his mouth instead.

“The accent, yes,” says Hannibal. “It’s muddled with the other languages they taught us while we were at home.”

“What others?”

“Latin and German. French,” he says, pausing when at this Will’s brows lift.

“I won’t try to speak mine to you,” he grins, a small and crooked thing much akin to himself as a whole. “It’s bastard French. Picked it up from my father, who picked it up from the men he fixed boats with. Cajun and creole.”

“Say something,” Hannibal encourages anyway, shifting a little on the bed to allow Will to rest his elbow to the mattress. “Anything, I’ll see if I can understand it.”

Will chews his lip and takes a breath before murmuring something. It’s quick, it’s smooth and entirely lyrical. It sounds nothing like the French Hannibal speaks, nothing like the slow rhythmic utterances of his mother and father. He smiles wide. He can understand it. It sounds like someone with marbles in their mouth.

“That’s incredible,” Hannibal laughs. “Some of those words don’t exist.”

“They do!” Will replies.

“Not in French,” Hannibal shakes his head. “ _They don’t exist in the language I speak._ ”

“God,” Will laughs, too, a breath out and a furrowed brow. Hannibal can taste the sassafras on his sigh, as they lay side by side, Hannibal on the mattress and Will on the floor. “It sounds so elegant. Regal,” he decides.

“It sounds correct,” Hannibal tells him, grinning, and Will gives him a rueful smile, more delighted than he’s willing to admit even to himself.

“Not here, it doesn’t. I don’t imagine most anyone would know what you’re saying beyond a few words. Fancy French,” he snorts, tucking his arm beneath his head to suffice as cushion for now. “ _If you don’t sound like you’ve come out of the bayou, you don’t stand a damn chance if you meet someone. No one likes an outsider here, even if you’re not really._ ”

Hannibal blinks, pressing his tongue against his lips as he tries to process the slick slur of words. He gathers the generalities of them and smiles a little. “ _Perhaps you can teach me_ ,” he says.

It’s in that moment, settled together, speaking a language - a language that only ever sprawls from Will’s tongue when he’s deeply displeased - with someone who speaks the same but not at all the same that Will is brought to quiet. It’s in that moment that he marvels at the ease of their friendship, if he dares call it such. He tells himself he couldn’t send a boy like this out into the world, with no idea of what’s out there or how to live in it. He tells himself that because it’s easier to explain it all that way rather than digging into the profound darkness that gapes wide inside him at the thought of being alone again.

“I can try to teach you,” Will says, not unkindly. His enthusiasm warms his words too much to sound at all burdened by such a thing. “Gotta teach you a lot, it seems like.”

“I’m a quick learner,” Hannibal replies, nuzzling into his arm. For a few moments he settles, eyes barely open and chest rising and falling in slow deep breaths. He reaches with his other hand to let it hang over the edge of the mattress, not touching Will but close enough that should the young man shift, Hannibal would feel it.

It occurs to Will that as he is unused to sharing his space, Hannibal is unused to being alone. Years and years with family, with people, with the reassurance of their breath and the soft sounds humans make living together. He watches Hannibal’s hand as the other boy’s breathing eases into sleep and he grows heavy, shoulders slumping and cheek stretching a little as Hannibal nuzzles against the bed again.

Will waits, he listens. The world outside goes quiet in a way he finds peaceful; insects hum and the marsh makes its own sounds at night, but there is nothing out of the ordinary there, nothing dangerous. The only thing markedly unusual is the man before him, sleeping naked on Will’s mattress, reaching out to him for comfort as a child might.

It’s strange. He’s strange. This entire day has been a complete inversion of Will’s plan for his time, and yet.

And yet.

Gently, so as not to make any sound at all, Will reaches to take Hannibal’s fingers against his own. He curls them and feels the gentle squeeze back, and finds that, for the first time in a long time, he wants nothing more than that contact, and to know he’s not alone.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Did you ever read about the pharaohs,” Will asks. “When they found their tombs?”_
> 
> _“I did,” Hannibal says, his own breath a little shorter now, the excitement buzzing between them noisy as cicadas in summer. “I did.”_
> 
> _“Open it,” Will grins._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Not once does Hannibal move towards Will’s shotgun. Not once does he take offense when Will’s nerves get rattled and he rests a hand on his knife. It’s habit as much as paranoia and both well-earned, from the stories Will slowly unravels to Hannibal about what the world became when Hannibal and his family lived in isolation.

Will goes to check the traps during the day, and Hannibal volunteers to sit by the spring and wash their clothes. They share the labor of field-dressing the animals that Will brings back, and Hannibal takes quickly to the work of tearing skin from flesh and removing organs to cook over a fire, preserving the muscle to dry and dust with bits of the herbs that Will collects for them. They practice French from the other’s tongue as they work in patient tandem.

No one harries them here, so close the swamps.

No one seeks them here, so far from any township.

The birds sing not to them but it feels as if they do, desperate calls of mating that Will knows signal the imminent arrival of winter.

It is warm and comfortable, hardly the smothering heat of summer that more than once has laid Will flat and miserable across his mattress. Hannibal’s voice becomes to him as familiar as the hiss of papery grass and Will’s company begins to feel as family to Hannibal who so keenly aches for his own. He teaches Will strange and occult notions of the world well beyond what Will has ever seen. Will teaches him of the world as it is now, and here, and fears less and less for that dread that early on pervaded him. The divide of their labors yields a freedom of rest that Will had long forgot.

As Hannibal’s ankle heals, he takes Will’s advice to toughen his feet up and walks mostly barefoot around their little home. He climbs trees when Will shows him the food he can find on top. He reaches for nests to get the eggs for them to suck free from their shells. He finds berries that are not poisonous for them to enjoy as they stain their fingers.

More and more, Hannibal learns to live in this new world. More and more, he soothes Will’s tension. As the nights grow colder, Hannibal slinks further back against the wall and Will finds his way onto the mattress with him.

It’s to conserve their body heat, Will tells them, when maintaining a fire without the security of wild summer growth to block the light. It’s to protect themselves, Hannibal agrees, should someone stumble upon them there with ill-intentions.

Neither admit their relief to find their forms pressed heart to throbbing heart beneath the quilt Will found in a collapsing house long ago. Neither admit how their cheeks burn hot in darkness when their skin contacts in accident that is anything but. Their food is shared, now, their shelter shared. Their work is shared and why not this, too, this sanctuary of safety found only so near the other?

For weeks, Will has not wondered whether or not Hannibal would attempt to commit violence upon him. Not since he first arrived and their laughter startled birds from their bowers and lasted long uprising into the humid air. Hannibal could no more harm him than, now, Will could harm Hannibal. To find one’s self suddenly alone, no matter their skill in survival, would be a cataclysm.

“We should go,” Will says, “to the station. See what’s left, take what we can both carry. Food perhaps, boots for you. We can bust apart the stands they used for magazines and use the wires.”

“For what?”

“For whatever it is that we might need wires for,” Will grins.

Hannibal shakes his head but he doesn’t disagree. Perhaps they could add more to their little home. Hang more supplies for the winter, build more supports for other rooms, store higher and safer in the trees the things they know the animals will not take.

“Shall I go in my moccasins?” Hannibal asks him and Will snorts.

“I’d not recommend going barefoot.”

“I suppose I could, now, compared to when you first pulled me from the swamp.”

They sleep then, with the peace that comes of knowing they avoided that peril and many more less obvious. When they go, they take a sack, within it a smaller one. Two tin bottles of water, a few pieces of jerky between them to share. Hannibal laces up the thick leather and fur shoes Will had helped him make and tightens them around his ankles.

“They’ll have to do,” Will says.

He hopes they find something more when they’re there.

From amidst the meadows of their makeshift permanent home they venture, further from the marsh-born trees with their heavy limbs and dour countenances, but never losing sight of them. Will keeps his head aloft, keenly turned toward roving wind and errant sounds. Hannibal knows to stop when Will does, to listen wary for terrors that Hannibal has only heard described but Will has seen and embedded into his bones.

They find a path, a road once, now splitting beneath ceaseless sun and weeds. Asphalt warms their thin soled shoes as they trudge along, sharing sustenance only when their shadows disappear beneath their feet. They speak little but say much more, sharing their rations with the other from their fingers, what began once as a bit of roughhousing when Will insisted Hannibal take his share and now continues. In this place, a strange intimacy they’ve found, as friends, as kin, as something indescribable to both who have no words to give the sensation that rivets their bodies stiff when they feel the other’s fingers brush their mouths.

Onward, ever onward, Will knows where they are going and Hannibal knows enough to know not to question him. For all the things he knows, knowledge now made esoteric and useless in the aftermath, his friend knows vastly more of what is required to live. To whatever end, to whatever ignominious end awaits them, the primal urge to thrive survives and in Will, that knowledge flourishes.

And then Hannibal sights it, faded greying bricks of the only structure he’s seen since he squeezed through the black gates that protected his neighborhood. Will lifts a hand and Hannibal lowers. For a time, they listen to little more than the whispering grass, conspiratorial. For a time, they settle eager nerves to stillness.

Only after so long that Hannibal’s legs cramp and Will grimaces when he stands do they carry on, confident that no one is at the rest station ahead. Will reaches, snaring Hannibal’s fingers in his own to keep him close. Hannibal needn’t have ever seen the things Will has described to fear them. He has found safety in this boy, who dragged him from the swamp. He clings to that sanctuary with laced fingers and as much alertness as he can muster beyond the swallow-song of nerves that alight his body.

The structure still stands strong, despite the years and weather that have flayed it. Old ads hang peeling from the walls like skin, some shifting in the warm breeze and others still, made heavy and hard by the rains that mashed paper with paste and water. Will steps around them, doesn't even look, but Hannibal does.

He peers at the faded words and false grins of the people in the pictures, and tries to understand what was once advertised here, with the strange product names and plastic smiles. He follows Will when his hand is tugged and doesn’t look back.

There is a large overhang above the old pumps, and Hannibal looks up, curious, at the old speakers and lights hanging askew and broken over them. He wonders if any of the wires could be used to pass a charge through again, if he could remember how to make a battery from a vegetable as he read in old school books and magazines promoting ‘fun projects to do with your kids’.

He goes, stumbling, when Will leads him onwards into the rest station itself. 

The glass doors are shattered, though a lock still hangs where the metal frames joined. Beyond, there are smears of old mud and new, animal prints and booted shoes. People and creatures who have come and gone in the lifetime since the last time the bell rang to announce a customer.

“Wow,” Hannibal whispers, squeezing Will’s hand a little harder.

It’s enough to bring Will to a stop, or at least a break in his stride. He glances back to his friend, to their tangled fingers, and makes his lungs fill before his attention snaps to the road. There’s nothing there, but there could be. Will musters a smile and tugs Hannibal along behind him.

“Come on,” he murmurs. “Inside. Mind where you step. That’s good leather you’ve got for soles but not enough to stop a nail going through.”

Hannibal forces his attention to the floor, the rounded blue glass glittering over black and white tiles interspersed. He follows Will’s lead into the space and stops when Will stops and listens hard when Will listens. Neither lets the other’s hand go until they are certain they are alone but for a songbird’s chitter from a nest in the ceiling. It’s given way a bit, collapsed beneath a laden branch, and opened up an entry for birds to make their homes among the fading red metal rafters. There are bursts of dry grass that betray them, let alone their scolding.

There are a few small shops within, bathroom signs prominently displayed for those who once stopped here in passage to another place. A fast-food restaurant whose commercials Hannibal recalls distantly from television reeks of rancid grease. A visitor’s center advertises swamp tours and gator hunts and bird watching. A gift shop is where Will heads first, unslinging his bag from his shoulder. Hannibal’s attention turns toward the convenience store, its shelves long empty and replaced by wayward leaves.

“Most of the clothes are no good anymore, and I’ve pillaged the place pretty well,” Will says, kicking through a pile of sweatshirts that declare their love of New Orleans, despite its distance away. “Once the roof gave out, everything got all moldy, but it’s always worth a look again. Might find something could be used for rope. Bandages.”

Will plucks up a roadmap, coated in plastic that’s yellowed with age. It’s legible enough, with narrowed details of the backwoods, much as it can be marked out with any kind of reason. He tosses it to Hannibal, who catches it with a questioning look.

“I’ll show you later where we are. Where not to go, where to go…” He offers a smile when Hannibal’s eyes widen a little. “In case something happens. Wouldn’t want you wandering off into the swamp again.”

Hannibal hums in something that could be annoyance but lets it go. It’s never a cruelly meant jest between them, now that Hannibal has learned where to feel with his feet, how to use his other senses, too, to know how close he is to falling in again. He folds the map and pushes it into his pocket as he goes to explore as well, leaving Will in the gift shop for now.

Though no cruelties happened here, the place feels haunted to Hannibal. He tries to recall what the word is for a place like this, once filled with people and activity, now silent and empty, left to the elements. He had collected words, for a while, to pass the time in that house; memorizing lists and creating new ones.

 _Kenopsia_.

There it is. It flutters through him and makes him shiver, but regardless, Hannibal steps further into the convenience store to explore whatever is left.

It’s clear that more people than Will have been here, all looking for different things. Old labels on the shelves indicate that Hannibal stands in the personal hygiene section, though there’s little to show for it. Leaves and leaves and dust, the old air conditioning unit long ago broken, letting the muskiness and heaviness of the air fill and settle in the space. Hannibal slips briefly before catching his balance and continues further in.

The racks have long since been stripped of any of the snacks they once held. The little posts from which they hung could prove useful though, and Hannibal slips a few - not yet rusted through - from the wall. These he drops into his bag, alongside a plastic bottle now empty, its lid missing but helpful for storing water. There’s a loud laugh from Will, and though the sudden noise jolts Hannibal sharply, he smiles soon thereafter at the sound of triumph.

“No shoes,” Will says, though there was only ever very little hope to find them here, “but look!”

He presents a pair of purple slippers, festooned with the faded embroidery of a Mardi Gras crown on the front. They’re faded and dusty, but whole enough still and not soaked to mush like so many other clothes fallen subject to the incessant moisture.

“Won’t do you much good in the swamp,” Will continues, picking his way past a fallen bookcase, “but they’ll be nice to warm up in. We can take turns,” he adds with a grin.

Hannibal laughs and takes them from Will, running his fingers over the dusty tops, against the soles, still rather intact, considering. He slips them into his bag and shows Will what else he’s picked up, knowing he’s done well by the smile he gets in return. The posts in particular. It will be good to bulk up the supports for the coming winter. When snow lays heavy enough, the warmth is easy to keep but the weight of the stuff threatens to crush Will in his little abode. And with both in there, now, moving and shifting and living, the support would not go amiss.

“You won’t find much in here,” Will tells Hannibal, less to discourage him but more, perhaps, to assure him that should he show up empty handed it will hardly be his fault. “Food’s always the first to go. Then medicine and sanitary items.”

“How many times have you been here?”

“Couple dozen,” Will shrugs. “Once in a while I go in to check in case someone else exploring left anything behind.”

“Any luck?”

“Never with more than footprints,” Will laughs. “But it helps me to keep track, I suppose, of how many people come and go.”

“Can’t they track you, too, then?”

“I reckon they could, but no one has. I don’t imagine too many folks think it’s worth following someone towards the marshes, and the ground there soaks up my steps anyway.”

Hannibal nods and circumvents another empty shelf, appraising its metal for a moment. Too hard to carry back, and they’ve nothing on them now to break out the flat pieces and carry. Something for the future, maybe, and the consideration of that word gives him pause before he continues on to a door. It’s on its hinges, still, dented deep but standing. The paint that’s not yet given way to rust has been scratched along its edge and Hannibal traces it with his fingers.

“Hell if I can get it open,” Will calls softly to him across the store. “Looks like nobody else can, either, but not for lack of all our endeavoring to do so.”

Hannibal lets his fingers trail down over the hinges. People have tried to wedge against them, tried to hammer them apart to get through the door this way, to no avail. Whatever is behind the door was important enough for people to keep safe, when there were people to protect it. It strikes him, now, that perhaps behind that door they will find little more than money, useless now, just paper and little metal coins, but then -

No. No, just as useless then, but it had a different meaning to people who didn’t have to fight to survive.

The hinges wouldn’t help them, then, if those before them - arguably bigger and far stronger - had tried already. He considers the dent, next, for no other reason than to imagine the number of feet kicking it in, or old shelves being used as battering rams. Violence. Force. Anger. Desperation. All things that push the logical mind to the wayside and take control. Hannibal’s eyes slip to the lock, beneath the broken-off door handle, that has remained untouched beyond the occasional scrape to bend the mouth of it just a little out of shape.

The mechanism within would have remained untouched.

Hannibal chews his lip and turns to look around the rubble for something thin.

Will watches him with interest, standing back just enough that he can keep an eye out through the window that reveals the cracked and fragmented parking lot beyond. He steps back when Hannibal moves past him, taking his bag to shoulder up against his own. Hannibal crouches to turn over a shelf, listens to the mutterings in a language Will has never heard before. Bracing his heel against the toppled bookshelf, Hannibal knocks the top free, rotting wood giving way with a damp crackle much akin to the crunch of cartilage.

Whatever it is he’s looking for, he doesn’t locate there. Will raises a brow, but does not interrupt whatever arcane task Hannibal has found for himself.

He slips around the counter then to where the register lies smashed open in defeat. It’s empty inside, ransacked when folks undoubtedly still imagined that money would matter to keep their bellies full and their families safe and their bodies dry. He grabs through a puddle of papery pulp and slips loose not one, not two, but three paperclips and even though two are so rusted that they crack as soon as he bends them, the third holds.

Will only nods as Hannibal produces the bent bit of wire, with a word that sounds as much kin to a curse as to a prayer. It’s hard to fight a smile though as, grinning, Hannibal darts toward him again.

“Your knife,” he says.

Will’s smile fades just a little, though he regrets that it does and moreso that Hannibal sees that doubt laid transparent even still. Old habits, old fears, all too relevant all the same. He sets his hand to his blade, however, and loosens it from its leather holster.

“Can I just ask why?” Will manages, hilt still in his hand and the words sticking thick in his throat.

“I won’t be able to turn the lock and work the mechanism at the same time,” Hannibal explains, watching realization warm Will’s features again before his brows draw, though his smile widens.

“You want to pick the lock?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t think anyone’s tried?”

“If they have, they haven’t done it well,” Hannibal points out, and Will snorts, following him to the door, still not relinquishing his knife.

“I don’t think it’s as easy as just putting something in and turning, the key’s got teeth for a reason,” Will says, and Hannibal stops, suddenly, damn near motionless, and ducks his head. “You okay?”

“Hang on.” Hannibal isn’t in pain, he isn’t struggling for breath or swaying in exhaustion. He is just still, just thinking, eyes seemingly nowhere at all, though they move to take in details Will cannot see nor imagine. He wonders, for a brief and cold moment of horror, if Hannibal isn’t having some sort of fit, something no herbs or water could help with, but then he sighs, rolls his shoulders and straightens them.

“You’re right,” he says. “We don’t need to turn the thing, we need to hold tension against the bottom plug.”

“Is that what I said?” Will muses. “Shit.”

He relinquishes the knife with its grip handed first. Layers and layers of thin leather made soft through use, fitted to Will’s hand. It’s the most valuable thing he owns, far and away. The rest could burn and he’d find a way, so long as he still had a blade to work with. It’s irreplaceable in this place, in this time, a gift from his father before he succumbed to sickness and a tool that has allowed Will his survival for this long.

Their fingers meet on its hilt and Hannibal inclines his head in thanks. Will mirrors the motion, and quiets the emptying of breath that squeezes flat his lungs when Hannibal turns back towards the door. Will follows, keeping distance. Pushed up to his toes he still can’t see past Hannibal’s shoulders but he’s far enough back that it would take more than a lunge to reach him.

Will catches his bottom lip betwixt his teeth and bites back his apology for the thoughts. There’s no need for it when no offense has been taken towards his wariness.

Hannibal treats the knife with careful respect, holding it gently before he turns it upside down, serrated edge towards the floor. He presses just the tip into the mangled lock, and feels around until he finds the thing he needs, and then he adds pressure to the weapon to hold the plug down.

Only then does he slip the paper clip into the lock as well.

It takes a few moments for him to get it positioned properly, as much listening to what’s going on as he is feeling it against the metal in his hands. Gentle movements, nothing like the confident and adventurous lockpicking Will remembers reading about in his adventure novels as a child. This is patience and time, displeasure at inevitable failure and the will to start again.

And again and again.

Hannibal murmurs things, perhaps to himself, perhaps to the lock, perhaps to Will. Something about pins and the shear line, tension and upper versus lower plugs. At one point he sits back entirely and flexes his fingers over and over before trying again, the knife point set, this time, to the top of the lock, not the bottom.

After what feels like far too long a time, enough that Will is prepared to suggest they go home before they lose the light, there is a click.

Will blinks. “Did you just…”

“There may not be anything worthwhile inside,” Hannibal reminds him, unable to hide his pleasure all the same. He smiles with his eyes, then a flash of crooked teeth, and finally laughs, handing Will back his knife.

Will nods, sheathing it again, and bringing the side of his hand against his mouth to keep himself quiet. For how many goddamn years had he seen that stubborn door, taunting he and everyone else who could not help but imagine what was inside? For how many goddamn years had Will told himself that those secrets were not his to know, as if that might make his annoyance ebb the next time he came around?

“Did you ever read about the pharaohs,” Will asks. “When they found their tombs?”

“I did,” Hannibal says, his own breath a little shorter now, the excitement buzzing between them noisy as cicadas in summer. “I did.”

“Open it,” Will grins. “You got it unlocked, you get to open it.”

Hannibal hooks two fingers against the hole where the handle once was and tugs. The hinges scream, but the door moves. Slowly, carefully, he turns to peek in as he pushes it wider. Within is a strange smell of lingering age, nothing rotten, nothing wrong, but a stillness that even in this still world seems foreign. He can feel Will behind him, and with a laugh, pushes the door wider still so they can both see.

Predictably, there is money. Littering the floor where it had been knocked from the little shelves its storage boxes stood upon when people had rammed the door. Predictably, Hannibal ignores it, stepping over the little sheets to get further into the storage room. It had been cooled, once - a place to store not only things in need of safekeeping but things to keep dry. Hannibal runs his fingers over the boxes on the shelves, marvelling at how many there are, untouched, unbroken, useful and usable. He turns to Will only when he makes a sound, a helpless delighted squeak of a thing, and lunges at one of the boxes on the bottom shelf.

His curse, by compare, erupts in English.

Will uplifts a box in rapturous triumph, holding it above his head with a victorious holler. It mutes in the room, drank up into the insulated walls.

“I never thought,” Will starts, before his laughter takes him. He’s damn near tearful in his joy, in a sudden rush of memories that seem to belong to someone other than himself, from a life lived other than his own. He scrubs the dust clear with his sleeve and shakes the box, another laugh erupting louder than he’s let himself be in longer than he can remember.

“I never thought I’d get one of these again,” he finally finishes, offering the box out for Hannibal to see. There’s a yellow moon, serenely-faced, set against a blue backdrop. Hannibal can gather from the snack cake displayed on front - chocolate-covered and layered within - the reason for Will’s pleasure, though to see his friend in such delight is worthy enough.

“Moonpie?” Hannibal asks, reading the box, and Will’s eyes grow enormous.

“Don’t tell me…”

“I’ve never -”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never,” Will scolds him, biting his lip as he glances behind them, and pushes the door to just to give them some semblance of protection should they be so unlucky as to be stumbled upon. He peels back the plastic that falls away brittle and crouches to work the box open. Inside are a dozen of the sweets, each individually wrapped, and near as he can tell still good.

“We weren’t allowed,” Hannibal tells him, with a wry smile. “Too many preservatives.”

“God bless fuckin’ preservatives,” Will exclaims. He tears open the package on one, hands shaking so badly he can hardly manage. A quick sniff yields no sign of decay, and hell, even if they have gone bad the worst that’ll happen is their stomachs will invert for a day or two. It’ll be worth it.

He offers it up to Hannibal, hiding his grin against his hand again. “You first,” he says. “If I start I’ll eat the whole thing myself.”

“Shouldn’t we -”

“Save them? Maybe some. Yeah, but - just try it,” he insists. “Come on, after all this? Least we deserve.”

Hannibal can’t argue that.

He reaches to take the thing from Will and turns it several times before biting into it. It’s softer than he had expected, crumbly, incredibly sweet. Hannibal licks his lips and hands the thing back, and Will laughs as he bites into the rest of it.

Compared to the jerky and berries, the occasional meat they didn’t have to dry and could cook over the fire, this is incredible. It’s almost too much. Hannibal immediately wants to drink some water to wash the taste away and at once reach for another to fill his mouth with that sweetness again. He goes for another, and Will laughs, handing the little packet up.

There are three boxes in the storage room, and Will rips every single one open to shove the treats into his bag without the bulk. The ones that don’t fit, they rip open and share, laughing when the chocolate smears on their fingers and on their faces, when the crumbs get stuck to the corners of their mouths as they eagerly consume them.

Beside the Moonpies are more boxes. Some of useless items, forms and uniforms - though some of those Hannibal packs for them as well, the material sturdy, still, and undamaged by water - and some hold inside more treasures. They find two bottles of clear clean water. They find little tubes filled with potato chips, still crisp where the lids hadn’t been damaged. They find jerky. They find chocolate. Everything and anything that Hannibal had not been allowed to eat and that Will has not had the chance to eat in years gets shoved into their sacks and into their pockets, as much as they can carry.

They’ll make it last, the best they can, but Will can think of nothing more than eating as much as he possibly can and damn the consequences. He wants to gorge himself, on sweet things and crunchy things and things with salt that he doesn’t feel obligated to use for preserving goddamn jerky. He won’t do that, they’ll take their time and ration it out, but Will is damnably dizzy with the thrill of it.

They find a pair of sneakers, tucked away where someone long ago left them. Hannibal saves the makeshift wraps they made and squeezes his feet inside. They’re a little too big, but he groans at the sensation of standing on more than his own bare soles or hardened bolts of leather bound up with cloth.

“Look,” Will says, though overladen with goods greedily grabbed, stretching towards a high shelf. Hannibal reaches past, just taller than Will enough to make up the difference, and he brings down a bottle fallen to its side. Coca-Cola, not in plastic, but in glass. “Do you think it’s still good?”

“It’s still liquid,” Hannibal reasons, tilting the bottle a little.

“I imagine it’ll stink pretty damn bad if it’s not good,” answers Will, altogether too eager to accept the proffered truth of this storage closet turned time capsule, tucked away and perfectly preserved. He takes the bottle and with careful turns of his knife pries the cap off, still sealed tight. It hisses a little, and the cap clatters to the ground.

Ducking to pick it up, Will’s bags shift and he glances through the door’s cracked opening. It’s later than he imagined, after all their time spent checking dates and elating in their finds. Everything’s expired, as they themselves should be, but just the same, whole and real despite what time has sought to do to them.

“We should drink it on the way back,” Will suggests. “Unless you want to sleep here. The light’s going.”

“No, let’s go,” Hannibal laughs, setting his hand with Will’s against the cool bottle, perhaps just to feel it, just to know that something that he had thought to never see again is here, and real and theirs to drink. He gently tugs and Will relinquishes it for Hannibal to have the first sip. It’s just as overwhelming as the Moonpie had been and Hannibal chokes before handing it back, laughing when the bubbles get into his nose and make him sneeze.

He feels little again.

He feels innocent again.

They stumble from the room and from the building and out onto the road once more, hands clasped around the bottle they take shared sips from, giggling like the children they are when they run out of the sweet nectar and both get hiccups from it.

“We could save the bottle,” Will says, catching another loud hiccup against the back of his hand. “Collect things in it, keep it as a reminder.”

“Of what?”

“The best days of our lives,” Will giggles, and Hannibal laughs with him.

“So far,” he offers, slinging his arm around Will’s shoulders and matching his stride to march in time with him.

The weight against his body tugs Will’s form taut, but only inasmuch as it takes a breath for him to relax again, against the tall boy at his side. He leans a shoulder into his side, their steps in synchronicity, as steady as his heart is not. Will might seek within himself to strive for answers to all of this, but he finds that the most abundant revelation as to the wellspring of sensations tickling his pulse swiftly beneath his skin is that he has a friend.

He has given himself in friendship, alike.

“Where did you learn to pick locks?” Will grins up at him, and Hannibal down at him in turn, surveying the freckles and sun spread warm beneath his eyes and over the bridge of his nose.

“There was a book,” he says. “And it seemed a useful way to pass the time. It drove my mother crazy, though. She worried I’d forget to lock one again after I’d opened it.”

Will snorts, laughing softly, as they depart the road and seek their way through the fields, pulled towards home.

In their time, they have accomplished more together than Will could have alone, not only in the revelation of Hannibal’s skill with locks and the sweet rewards still sticky on their lips, but in the daily chores that must be maintained against the relentless tidal pull of time. It is with this partnership in mind, pushed to the fore of Will’s thoughts beyond the low drone humming drowsy beneath his skin and sourcing from where their bodies meet, that he finally asks.

“Do you think you’ll go? To find them, I mean.”

Hannibal considers and shrugs, tensing for a moment and breaking stride for just the two steps needed to find it again.

“I tried,” he reminds Will. “Climbed out of the house and out of that community and wandered my way into a swamp.”

“Maybe they went the other way?”

“Who knows,” Hannibal replies. “Sometimes it's easier not to think about it. And them. I hope they're safe and I miss them terribly. But if I quest and find nothing it will be time wasted. Whereas here,” he smiles down at Will, slipping his hand from Will’s shoulders to thread their fingers together instead. “Here I can do something as I wait. Maybe they'll find us.”

“It seems unlikely,” Will says, but his smile holds pain in it even as he makes it form. Recompense is granted by the twining of their fingers tighter together. He no more wants Hannibal to go than he wants him to live forever in wonder of what became of his family. There is no resolution, thus, and so he bears closer as they walk to their home, the only that Will has known for three winters and the one that Hannibal has accepted and grown into like the morning glories that thread through the dry eastbound branches.

With this agreed, in whatever what way they speak around it, Will lets himself settle to the thought that at least for a while, a while more, he won’t be left alone again. Their hovel is as known to them as any plantation house, and as they approach it, they pick up speed. Clattering across the dying grasses, laughing loudly with none beknownst to them to hear it, they topple their bags to the entryway of their home and clasp the other near.

“You’ve got Moonpie on your mouth,” Will tells him, his proper and educated friend grinning in response.

“Where?”

“There.”

“Show me.”

Will does, with a thumb smeared through chocolate that darkens beneath Hannibal’s bottom lip. His breath stills and seemingly even the breeze aside them as Hannibal parts his lips to savor it. They have made a game of this, feeding the other with insistence that they eat the other’s share of food. But this is hardly stiff sun-dried jerky or bits of swamp lettuce gathered lush and green from the borders of the marsh.

This is something sweeter. Something decadent and seemingly forgotten.

Hannibal suckles the taste of it and Will’s lips part when he himself can taste it too.

“You’ll stay?” Will asks, breath foreshortened enough to dizzy him.

Hannibal nods quickly, as rushed and hot and breathless as Will is, too. He can feel his heart rocketing in his chest, can feel how the sugar so long missing from his system ratchets his energy up like clockwork.

He has so much energy. He has no idea what to do with it.

So he leans in and grasps Will’s cheeks and kisses him soundly on the mouth, holding him close and trembling when Will makes a sweet helpless sound of surprise. When Hannibal pulls back, eyes wide, and smiles. 

“You had some chocolate too,” he explains in a whisper.

Will stands stunned, shocked to silence by such closeness as this. He’s never been kissed before, though he’s aware of such a thing. He’d not deny he’s imagined what it might feel like, laying alone late at night and recalling images of movies whose names he can’t remember.

Nor could he deny his nature’s seeking for it from the boy who stands pressed against him now, noticing in every minute motion the way his lips part and mold together in thought. The way he looks when they’re bathing together and the water slicks silver across his skin. He squeezes Hannibal’s hand, their wrists turned awkwardly, and bringing it to his side drags Hannibal nearer, too.

“There’s more,” Will says, desperate. “I’m sure there is, chocolate and Coke and -”

He’s swept up into another kiss, their lips parting wide together. A clumsy mash of mouths ferociously seeking for a far sweeter thing than any snack or drink might muster. Will raises his other hand, to grasp in golden strands of hair, and their steps stumble, each bearing forwards and back all at once against the other in a drunken stagger, intoxicated by the other’s mouth sliding slick against their own.

Hannibal holds Will against him, ducking his head even as he pushes up on his toes in his new too-large shoes. It feels more powerful than opening that door, sweeter than anything they’ve tasted today. He has thought of Will like this more than once, watching his petal-soft lips parted in sleep if Hannibal woke in the night, he has wondered how they would taste, how Will would. 

Beautiful, he decides. Just beautiful. 

“We should,” he mumbles, eyes barely open and cheeks dark with pleasure. “The stores… stuff… before the -”

He sways a little and laughs, kissing Will again.

With a mindfulness towards their own form of propriety, Will bears him back into their home. Their mouths part only enough to draw air as fuel for their furious kissing. Their mouths part only so long as needed for both to crouch and drag their haul inside. They press to the other, hands on cheeks and fingers in hair and lips and tongues and teeth grasping for purchase until Hannibal first bends and Will follows him down to the crinkling mattress beneath.

Neither have in themselves any knowledge of what they do. Neither bear any shame, whatsoever, that may have been pressed upon them in distant youth. They are friends, sworn unspoken to keep their hardscrabble life intact. They are friends who lick the lingering sweetness of soda pop and snack cakes from the other’s willing tongue.

Will is the first to sit back, and jerk off his thin flannel shirt without a mind for unbuttoning it. Hannibal is the first to press his kisses to bared skin, stroking across Will’s chest with his lips in eager kisses and suckles both, moaning low when Will’s fingers fist in his hair. They are clumsy together, stumbling into a kinship neither understands nor cares to define. It feels good. It’s intoxicating. They are drunk on the other and each wants little more than to feel their bodies bared.

Animal and raw, Will jerks Hannibal’s head back and bites his bottom lip.

Animal and raw, Hannibal grabs Will by the waist to bring him back to the mattress alongside him.

“The food,” Will mutters, helpless as a hare in the snare of a trap, this one made of Hannibal’s mouth against his own.

“We’ve brought it in,” Hannibal reasons. “Animals won’t get it. Need to secure the door but -”

“Tomorrow.”

“Mm.” Hannibal frames Will’s face with his hands and slinks on top of him to press him down, rocking their hips together in jerky uneven motions that bring them both to gasping. “You feel good,” Hannibal whispers, licking his way into Will’s mouth again for another greedy kiss.

Every thrust of their forms together feels like a winter chill against Will’s skin. He shivers, static-sharp and electric, skin shrinking in a sensation that spills sparks behind his eyes. Will clasps Hannibal to him, clutching hard with a hand against his back and the other in his hair. He tilts his head back to bare his throat and hardly knows the sound of his own voice when he moans from the warmth of Hannibal’s mouth against his throat.

“There,” Will begs. “Right there.”

A noisy suck just beneath his ear erupts in the length of his body and jerks it upward against Hannibal’s own. Will groans as his dick, standing stiff within his pants, meets the sharp angle of Hannibal’s hip. He rubs it there. He rubs again. He laughs helpless and weak beneath the boy he dragged out of the swamp, and who has changed the whole of his world.

“Don’t stop,” Will begs. “Not for anything.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Hannibal stirs a little and makes a soft sound against Will that hums through his bones. He tugs Will closer still with the arm around his middle and sighs heavily against his hair._
> 
> _Outside, the rain begins to fall harder._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Hannibal wakes to the sound of rain against the thatch-and-steel roof and immediately looks down at Will still curled small in his arms. 

They fell asleep this way, tangled in each other. When Will said not to stop, both knew that neither could. Hannibal’s stomach still knots to recall how touching Will had made his body feel too hot all over. Tacky flaky stickiness still pulls and clings between his thighs where he spilled his seed when they rubbed together. From Will’s wide eyes, his open mouth and his strangled moan, Hannibal knew he had shared the same discovery.

Reluctantly after, neither bothering to put their shirts back on, they checked the closest traps near their home, gathered two buckets of water from their pool for a morning scrub, and shared another Moonpie each. Marshmallow stuck to their fingertips as they fed themselves and the other, snorting sleepy laughter when they sucked the other’s skin clean. Finally, pulling all of their bags and clothes and supplies into their little home, and with the door secured, they slept.

Now, it seems as if they made the most of the last clear day they’ll see for a while. Once the rains start, they take days, sometimes weeks to stop. Hannibal settles onto the mattress again and nuzzles warmly into the curls at the back of Will’s neck where they are softer, smaller than the ones on his head. It doesn’t take him long to ease to dusk-like sleep once more.

Will can hardly do the same. He’s too aware of the press of their bodies, in near-far close-distant memory of what occurred only hours before. It began and ended so quickly, his body overwhelmed enough to blur his thoughts in turn. Grasping hands across golden skin, mouths smearing heated sounds against the other’s throat and lips and chest. Hard shoves of hipbones jutting sharply into the other to press their twitching cocks to stillness between their stomachs made round and soft with so much food.

It began and ended in mere minutes, if that long, a dizzying drive that left both startled and elated, exhausted and smeared with the other’s seed where it spattered past their pants and darkened spots against worn material. Will’s dick sticks to his stomach and pries itself free with burgeoning fullness as he wriggles backward, beneath his friend’s sleep-heavy arm. The press of Hannibal’s dawning erection, a solid ridge pinned against the curve of Will’s ass, is enough to cause the sound of his own breath to seem far too loud.

He swallows, to clear away the noisy pulse that hisses like dry grass between his ears.

Will can’t begin to fathom what it is he wants, beyond the din of _more, now, yes, more_. His body responds to things he only remotely grasps, described to him long ago in stilted discomfort by his father and understood better by watching the animals when spring strikes a fevered note of furious rut and all around are the calls and responses and jerky joinings of mating. There is relief, at least, that for whatever this all means, they needn’t concern themselves with creating another mouth to feed.

There is relief greater still in the weight of Hannibal’s heavy body against his own, as eager perhaps as Will to share in the discovery of their bodies and the depths of their affection for their friend. Will bites his lip and pushes back a bit more. Spine flush to Hannibal’s chest, bottom pressed where Hannibal’s legs curve beneath his own.

Hannibal stirs a little and makes a soft sound against Will that hums through his bones. He tugs Will closer still with the arm around his middle and sighs heavily against his hair.

Outside, the rain begins to fall harder. 

“It seems we're trapped by the weather today,” Hannibal points out, voice low and rough with sleep. He pushes up against Will as he adjusts his position and stretches. His cock twitches softly where the other boy lies so close and Hannibal bites his lip.

“Good thing we got everything off the floor,” murmurs Will, cracking open an eye to survey their supplies, elevated on makeshift shelves made of cinderblocks. The packed earth will slowly turn to mud, when water filters through the packed-branch walls. The plastic will protect their mattress.

Nowhere to go. No work to be done. Nothing to do but wait out the rain, together.

Every shift of movement between them ripples through Will like the low caress of thunder, the air electric in what scant spaces exist between their bodies, the atmospheric pressure of their lungs dropping with every breath that brings them nearer. He is brazen, past the point of apprehension. Hannibal’s slow sighs against his bare shoulder each time tug his cock to turgid stiffness. Will slips a hand down to squeeze himself, and loosen the fastenings of his pants. Subtle movements, almost sly, aware of Hannibal’s awareness but both willing to play as if nothing is happening at all.

Inch by indiscreet inch, Will thumbs his waistband lower, to bare himself and feel Hannibal’s body against his own with even thin threads of fabric removed from betwixt their forms.

Hannibal laughs against Will’s skin and watches over his shoulder. It is dark in their little home, no windows to let even the weak light in, but they are both used to it, both can see enough. Hannibal waits until Will has bared himself and then slips his own hand down to cover Will’s. 

“Do I do that?”

“Yes.”

Hannibal laughs again, starting to stroke against Will until he slips his hand free and Hannibal can touch him skin to skin unhindered. Slowly, he rocks up against Will’s ass, his own cock hard in the confines of his pants but clearly felt. If one were to ask the other what they were doing, neither could truly answer. But in their clumsy push and pull, they find new pleasures that none has known before. Will digs his elbow beneath him against the crinkling mattress, to better hold himself back against Hannibal, delighted when the added friction tilts Hannibal’s sigh into a lower moan.

Will’s own voice is pressed to his arm, hand resting on Hannibal’s wrist where he tugs his cock like Will imagines he’s touched himself before. Furtive squeezes, hand formed to a snug tunnel, Will can hardly draw a breath at all as every time he tries the mere thought that Hannibal’s hand is on his dick steals his air away again. He daren’t look, the sensation of touch is enough, rough fingers now work-calloused but gentle gliding eagerly against his length.

Head against Will’s shoulder, Hannibal ducks his head to watch between them, shadowed but for pale flashes of Will’s bare bottom, the tent in his own pants driving steadily forward again and again. Slotted between his cheeks, an upward tilt finds the head of his cock rubbed against worn fabric. Better than pushing forward, Hannibal now knows, clenching his ass and curving his spine to stroke firmer.

“Do I do that to you?” Will echoes, biting his lip in a blushing grin.

“Yes,” Hannibal breathes, lips parted and eyes barely open. He lets Will go for just a moment to work his own pants open and down his thighs. He doesn’t protest when Will wriggles around to face him, eyes wide and dark with pupil, lips bitten red.

He is beautiful. 

So Hannibal kisses him, more confident today with the practice they shared yesterday, kissing until their lips went numb and tingled at even the gentlest brush of fingers.

When Hannibal rocks against Will this time, the silken skin of their cocks rubs together and both boys make soft surprised sounds of pleasure. This is much better than caught up in their pants, a tangle of legs and mouths and moans and shuddering jerky thrusts. Both boys watch, rapt, the sight of their cocks’ contact as intoxicating as the stiff brush of delicate shafts and sensitive heads and twitching veins.

“Yours is bigger than mine,” Will whispers, snorting when he laughs.

“Yours curves more,” notes Hannibal, mashing a kiss against Will’s wild hair.

Will wraps an arm beneath Hannibal’s, hand looped over his shoulder to give better leverage. He lifts his eyes to watch Hannibal’s expression as he mirrors his movement, thrusting against him, tilting upward, gaze hooding as Hannibal’s lips part. Hannibal’s leg wraps across Will’s, heel set to his calf.

 _Like this?_ they ask with every glance and every new adjustment.

 _Like that_ , they answer with breathless laughter and quaking moans.

The heat rises in their bellies, faster than the night before and just as addictive. Neither want to stop. Neither want to try prolonging the pleasure when it feels so good _now_. Surely they will recover quickly enough to do it again, and again and again, this intoxicating whirlwind of novel and welcome pleasure.

Hannibal bites his lip and Will leans in to kiss it, to encourage him to let it go so Will can tug it with his teeth instead.

“Feral,” Hannibal whispers, laughing as Will does. “Untamed and - oh -”

He brings his hand down to stroke himself and grips Will to his palm at the same time, stroking them both. The sensation is overwhelming, and with wide eyes and a crack in his voice Hannibal comes hot and thick between them both. Will’s breath cuts short. He bears down hard in the pit of his belly to hold back his release for a little more, just a little more, another stroke, another tug of come-slick fingers, their contact gliding smooth and hot now more than rough friction.

Just one more stroke.

Just one more. 

He gasps, though his lungs are already full to bursting, and a high cry splits his voice in something between a laugh and a sob. Fingernails digging into Hannibal’s shoulder, Will bucks hard against the heat between them and jettisons loose his seed in thick dollopy ropes. Will groans against Hannibal’s shoulder, eyes closed, body emptying itself in spatters against mattress and stomachs and cocks and Hannibal’s fingers that squeeze a little tighter still and milk him dry.

“Again,” Will whispers, laughing helpless. Before his body has even begun to relax, he begs, grinning, “Again.”

Hannibal laughs, panting, against him and shakes his head. He wants to, lord, does he. But his body trembles, exhausted in the best possible way.

“I think I saw stars,” he admits, laughing when Will snorts against him. “I’ve never felt so good before.”

“It doesn’t feel as good when I just touch myself,” Will tells him, stroking languid fingers over and over Hannibal’s chest. “It’s never that bright, never that -”

“Powerful?”

“Yeah.”

Hannibal grins and turns his face against their shared pillow. “I think this is what being drunk feels like.”

Will hides a smile, though he knows Hannibal feels it all the same, nosing softly against his shoulder. In their time together, they alone and no one else in the world, Will has noticed their differences time and again. Hannibal is taller, leaner. Will’s muscles are more tightly formed, his shoulders just a hair wider. Lingering attention paid to the only other body that exists here beyond his own, Will knows not when the curiosity shifted to appreciation, just as he knows not precisely when the sight of his friend stirred a sweet and giddy tension in the pit of his stomach.

Never did he feel any shame for it. Never any discomfort. But neither did Will know what to do with such emotions until now, and now it all seems so goddamn simple that he laughs.

Setting his hands to Hannibal’s chest, he turns him to his back and as Hannibal wriggles to center himself on the mattress, Will shucks his pants. Tangling around his ankles, he tugs them free and sets them up from the muddying floor, shoved snug against an ensnarement of branches. He stuffs Hannibal’s alongside and with a bit more clumsy adjustment, knees bumping and balance lost laughing, Will sits astride his friend and takes him in properly.

He can do that now, look in earnest without being furtive about it. He can let his pulse quicken without reminding himself to focus on whatever work is at hand. He can touch, and he does, palms following up Hannibal’s waist to his ribs, fingertips grazing the hair beneath his arms, hands spanning the wealth of hair on his chest in turn.

“I don’t think I’m getting any of this,” Will snorts, amused.

“You’re lucky,” Hannibal laughs, and Will raises an eyebrow, continuing to stroke over his chest, smiling when Hannibal hisses in a breath and his cheeks darken when Will’s fingers brush a nipple.

“You don’t like it?”

“I didn’t think anyone would,” Hannibal admits, sheepish.

“I like it,” Will tells him, setting his hands to Hannibal’s chest as he arches and stretches, smiling at his friend.

And he does like it. He has never seen someone who looks like this, but the sensation of running his fingers against the warm hair, knowing it is Hannibal’s, that he is the warm man Will will sleep against and curl up on at night… he couldn’t imagine a companion more perfect. The twitch of Hannibal’s muscles, sensitive and tender, beneath his hands makes Will flatten them a little firmer. Less tickling, more secure, stroking lazily through thick hair and over pebbled nipples stiffened dark.

Will bites his lip when Hannibal lifts his hands, damn near circling Will’s waist with them. He pushes his thumbs against the dip on each hip, stroking low to the vee-shape that points to Will’s softened, sticky cock laying against Hannibal’s belly. Upward, then, over ridged ribs and back down.

“I like this,” Hannibal decides, and Will snorts, grinning.

“You like what?”

“Your middle.”

“I’m skinny.”

“Lean,” Hannibal tells him. “Lithe.”

“You’ve got bigger words than me,” mutters Will, though he can readily feel the reddening of his cheeks at the praise. “All I can say is that I like how you look. And I’m glad I get to touch you now.”

“Did you think about touching me before?” Hannibal asks, and Will snorts, raising an eyebrow in disbelief. Hannibal consents that the question is hardly worth answering. He spreads his palms down over Will’s thighs next and hooks his fingers behind his knees.

He looks over Will as Will looks over him, taking in the slighter form that wears more scars than Hannibal could count. Small things, barely visible things, yet they’re there, proof of a life lived hard in the wilderness for most of Will’s young life. Hannibal reaches for one across his collarbone and gently strokes it with his thumb as Will shivers and bites his lip.

“What’s this one from?”

“I broke my collarbone,” Will tells him. “Before all of this. I was little and fell out of a tree. That mark’s the only thing that’s left now that it’s years healed.”

Hannibal hums, and with his hands flat against Will’s shoulders, brings him low. He traces the mark with his mouth, lips and tongue and a final graze of teeth, enough even in its tenderness to make Will shiver. A laugh spills softly as he does, aware of how foolish they are but hardly fighting it.

“And this one,” Hannibal asks, nuzzling against a little mark on Will’s chest, just above his nipple.

“Walked into a branch.” Hannibal’s grin widens, and Will laughs again, threading his fingers through Hannibal’s sleek, soft hair and rubbing lazily against him with a languid twist of hips. “I did,” he says. “It’s hard to make sense in the swamp, what’s near and what’s far. I didn’t see it sticking out, but it surely stuck me.”

This, too, Hannibal kisses, amusement twitching in his stomach. Will tugs his hair and pulls back his head, curling their lips together in a clumsy twist. Their mouths bend and curve, tongues licking sun-warmed lips, chapped dry from the wind. Another pull brings Hannibal back to the mattress and he laughs low as Will continues his own survey of the terrain he’s observed and for too long resisted exploration.

Down firm, flat stomach and dipping into his belly-button. Over high risen hips and lower still. Will tickles along the hair that thickens again as it trails lower and runs his fingers down the satisfied soft dick of his dearest, his only friend. Curious, grinning past bitten bottom lip, Will teases the lank skin that encircles his cock, velvet soft and dark.

“I don’t have this, either,” Will tells him, an unconscious coiling rocking his body to a lax thrust against the boy beneath him.

Hannibal shivers and squirms a little at the touch. Will lets him go for just a moment, but the wriggling wasn’t from pain. Will watches Hannibal’s cheeks darken and his lips part and reaches carefully down again to touch there.

“It’s so soft.”

“Will,” Hannibal laughs and rubs a hand over his face, blush darker and body responding in waves of shivers and goosebumps over and over his skin. It feels incredible, good and strange and dizzying at the same time.

Will gentles his touches but doesn’t stop them, and carefully he rubs the soft skin over Hannibal’s cockhead as he lifts his eyes to watch him.

“Do you like it?” Will asks, as much to hear him say it as to truly know.

“Yes,” sighs Hannibal.

Blushing torrid, Will slides his body down a bit further, to sit across Hannibal’s thighs. He softly pinches the gathered skin in his fingers. He stretches it just a little and Hannibal’s moan spills goosebumps across Will’s skin. It’s exciting enough to be able to touch him this way, more thrilling still for the touch to be welcomed and to elicit such sounds from his friend.

Will tucks his other hand between his legs and palms his cock, still sticky with the shared expression of their own seed, but growing full and hot again all the same. He rubs himself in time with the gentle tugs against Hannibal’s extra skin, gaze flicking upward once more to confirm his companion’s pleasure. Assured of such, Will watches Hannibal’s cockhead expose glistening from beneath the delicate skin, slid back slowly.

“Does it hurt?” Will asks, wary. “When I do this, does it hurt?”

Hannibal shakes his head and presses his palms to his face, groaning gently into the hollow they make. No, no it doesn’t hurt. It feels more remarkable than their initial coupling had, more intense than the pleasure they shared less than an hour before. This is something entirely impossible, and Hannibal can barely breathe.

Will strokes his foreskin down further, revealing the dark pink skin beneath, already slick as Hannibal’s cock hardens in Will’s hands. It’s so strange, nothing like Will’s penis, yet entirely beautiful to watch respond and move. Will lets him go and shifts to sit a little closer again, just enough for their cocks to touch against Hannibal’s stomach. The older boy drops his hands and watches Will, eyes wide and just as surprised as he is by this development. He knew it was sensitive, he had touched it often enough himself, but when Will does it, it is something else entirely.

“It stretches,” Will murmurs, gently stroking the skin with this forefinger again, letting another join it as Hannibal laughs and shrugs and nods all at once, unsure what to say. “How does it feel?”

“Wonderful,” Hannibal laughs, though the word itself seems far too small for every light and languid movement that tightens his body in currents of pleasure.

“More than that,” grins Will. “Tell me, mine’s not like yours.”

Pressing his tongue between his lips, Hannibal tilts his head back and stares upward at their woven stave ceiling, darkening with water slowly soaking through. He thinks of the storm outside, he thinks of what works need to be done. He tries to think of those things for more than a fleeting instant, before his attention centers again on the work-worn fingers that caress his cock so tenderly.

“Snug,” Hannibal says. “It’s not, normally, it’s soft and sensitive. But the more you touch it -”

“You like when I do.”

“Yes.”

“And it’s snug now.”

“Yes,” sighs Hannibal, finally daring a darting look downward to where Will works him to hardness again. He’s not ungentle, in fact he’s very careful. Both boys still tingle tender from release so soon before, and Will is as kind towards Hannibal’s body as he would be his own.

Will slips the foreskin down as far as he thinks it can go, going by the soft sounds Hannibal makes, and then he releases it, watching it slowly slink back. It’s so strange to him, he’s never touched that on himself before, he’s never known that something was missing before. Now, he envies Hannibal this little flap of skin that sends his entire body to shivering when Will touches it.

He wonders how it would feel, he wonders what that sensation would be like, to have something so snug around him, so soft and thin. Will swallows and considers Hannibal beneath him, and the older boy brings a hand to his teeth to gently bite against a knuckle.

“What?”

Will hesitates to ask. It seems so invasive, the idea of putting one’s self inside another. But hard in his hand and made brash by his own ardent arousal, Will dares.

“You said it stretches,” Will asks. Hannibal nods, brow knit but hardly in dismay. Curiosity instead pervades him, as it unspools within Will and fills him enough to shorten his breath and soften his voice. “I wonder if...”

“What?”

“I wonder if…”

“What?” Hannibal laughs, a third time, and Will grins, abashed.

“Tell me if it hurts.”

“I will.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” Hannibal says. There is a clumsy bumping of body against body as he settles up to his elbows and Will slides a bit further down. Both are hard, both are moved by both temerity and inquisitive interest after so long so far from another person, let alone one so much like themselves.

And one so entirely different, all the same.

Will curls his fingers around the flared rim of Hannibal’s cock, bringing the skin to a gathering of wrinkles at its tip. He pulls a little further and Hannibal gasps, but their eyes meet and Hannibal shakes his head. It doesn’t hurt, he’s fine, Will believes him and he rises to his knees. Holding his own dick level steady in his trembling grip, he pushes forward enough to penetrate the impossibly small opening of skin that gathers glistening slick around the tip of Hannibal’s cock.

It’s slippery and uncoordinated, and both laugh as Will tries to do more than gently press the tip of his cock to Hannibal’s. But then he slides his hand up further, cupping the little space where they should join, and then he’s overwhelmed by the slippery heat and slick around him, and with a gasp, looks down at Hannibal to make sure he isn’t in pain.

He had thought Hannibal beautiful before this, before they joined so intimately, just in the water of their cool and safe little pool. He had thought him beautiful the night before, kissed silly and sleepy from sex. Now, though, Will thinks he will never see Hannibal look so entirely in bliss as he does here. His hands grasp and relax against the mattress, tugging the plastic on it until it creaks. His lips are parted and red, eyes closed and neck bared in beautiful submission.

He makes no sound but he hardly has to, Will can see his pulse hammering in his throat, can hear the sharp pants of air past his teeth that almost hiss loud enough to cover the sound of the rain around them.

“Oh my God,” Hannibal breathes.

Will, too, groans a low and untoward curse against their maker for no sooner presenting them to the other to savor such bliss as this. Hannibal did not lie, his extra skin that Will does not possess does indeed stretch. Over the swollen head of Will’s cock and down around its rim, seeming to swallow it and embrace it all at once. Their tips leaking wet against the other push vying for so small a space, each twitch of unpracticed hips bringing in their bodies near-unbearable pleasure.

Will gasps, quaking weak, and throws his spare hand down against the mattress.

He grips them both to keep the connection of their bodies tied, by such slight and tender skin as this.

Within Hannibal’s body, Will elates in pleasure heretofore unimaginable. Will thinks of Eve, eating sin in the Garden of Eden. Will thinks of Prometheus who stole glory from the pagan gods. He thinks most of Hannibal beneath him, fingers spread aloft in the air and shaking in a weakness never once has his friend revealed to him.

He bucks his hips and nearly breaks from the riotous pleasure that shrinks his skin with goosebumps erupting wild. He thrusts again and Hannibal bends beautiful, back arching from the mattress beneath. They share the other’s fragile faltering form in breathless delight, the way they have learned to share space and resources and sustenance.

Is this not its own sustenance, of sorts? Is this not its own worthy resource which each would gladly give for the other to know and savor?

Hannibal’s toes curl and he turns his head away for no other reason than to try and catch his breath. He reaches to circle Will’s wrist with his fingers, just to feel that connection there as well. He holds him near and bites back the little cries of pleasure, of something feeling so good it is almost too good.

He can’t breathe well, just panting and stuttering little things.

And it doesn’t matter. It doesn't matter because Will whispers his name and Hannibal knows that no matter what happens, this boy will not let him go. Not for anything. Not for anyone.

“Will -”

“Hannibal,” he breathes, the name sweet as any prayer he’s ever whispered and far more meaningful. God did not protect him. God did not give him comfort in his bleakest hours. God gave him nothing of the promised paradise that Hannibal has by sharing his body and Will releases them only when his hand shakes too much to hold them joined any longer.

He sprawls across his friend, thrusting ceaseless where their bellies press their cocks together. Kisses tangle as the first droplets of rain spatter against Will’s back and Hannibal’s arms around him and the mattress beneath. Laughing too hard to keep their lips together, they try and try again, helpless in the other’s offering of themselves entirely,

“Don’t you dare go,” Will mutters, finding it easier now to slow their rough frottage with their last release so near. He bites his lip and lets it go with a laugh, his shaggy hair forming a sanctuary around their faces as they lay bare and grinding slow. “Or if you go, swear you’ll take me with you. Swear it.”

“Anywhere,” Hannibal whispers. “Everywhere I go, I swear.”

Will kisses him, hands against his face and eyes closed as he loses himself entirely to the warmth and heartbeat of the body beneath his. He doesn’t need anything else. He doesn’t need anyone else. If until their dying day they live in the swamps, keep their pool clear and grow a garden, find ways to forage no one has ever thought of, he could not be happier.

Will has no one else, now. He never wants to lose anyone else again.

They are both young. They are both strong. They are clever and ferocious and make the other laugh and who needs anything more than that? Food and water they have, or could find again. Shelter and clothing they have, or could find again. With Hannibal at his side, Will is fearless. He revels in his strength as sincerely as he desires to keep him sheltered from the horrors that Will’s father tried to shield from him.

Will wonders if he’s ever known happiness before Hannibal, and is certain of his answer as soon as the thought occurs.

They tangle legs and arms around the other, vying for purchase in a gentle war of dominance that neither wants to win. Thrusting, grinding, rutting needy against the other, they kiss clumsy and grasp hard. Eager to know the other’s body as intimately as they know their own, shoving hard together as if they might become whole in form as they have in heart, they settle their brows together and bend their mouths to meet.

Let the rain fall.

Let the floods come.

There is nothing in nature greater than their own relentless love for the other, and in this moment, nothing could subsume them but themselves.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Like animals, their skin prickles not from cold but from alarm. Like animals, encroached upon in their bower, they bristle in anticipation. Will’s heart beats too loudly in his ears for him to hear but the unmistakable crunch of a footstep is loud as a gunshot._
> 
> _It could be a creature, but one so big as to lay that weight upon the earth?_
> 
> _It could be a beast, but one that scrapes a hand across the door to their home?_
> 
> _Will gropes blindly for his knife, and as its blade tilts their bottle to floor, their world ends a second time._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Will is not a hunter. He is an expert trapper and an able fisherman, but when it comes to a direct kill, he finds the concept brutal. 

Hannibal has asked him once what the difference was, since those poor creatures that wandered into his traps died too, and Will has never had an answer.

Only once, late at night, when neither could sleep because of the stifling humidity, did Will suggest that he was scared that should he start to hunt he would get a hunger for it that would never be sated. Like the tribes that roved and raided, killing for no other reason than the sheer joy of seeing something die.

“I kill only what I need to survive,” Will said. “I don’t waste anything in my traps, I honor it and use every part. Fat for the lamps and waterproofing my boots, sinews to bind and hang herbs and jerky, bones I grind down and add to the mud to keep the house sturdier when I build it up, fur for keeping warm. If I started to hunt, I fear I would forget to honor, and become nothing more than a murderer.”

Hannibal hadn’t suggested the idea again.

He is chastened, though Will has said to him no such words intended to bear that effect. For all the years he spent in his home, for all his complaints about boredom and displeasure in eating the same thing day in and day out, never knowing from what his parents shielded them. Never once did he grasp that riots were tearing cities apart from the heart outward, buildings falling to flames of rage and fury at humanity’s own impotence. Never once did he imagine that humanity then turned inward on itself. As he fussed about rice for supper, Will was out here hiding alongside his father and praying that the raiders did not decide to upturn their home. As he took to being sullen, claustrophobic in their closeness, Will and his father fought for food enough to fill their mouths and not to become food for others.

This in particular interests Hannibal, so ghastly in its consideration that he cannot help but fixate on it.

“There are those,” Will told him, “who do, I suppose, pay honor to those they kill. They use their bones and skin. They eat their flesh and use their hair to trap warmth. They maintain their stockpiles this way, with a worse fate yet for those they choose to keep rather than devour straightaway.”

There was no praise in Will’s words, his gaze distant as he pulled in a line with a fish struggling in counter-tension. The weight of his tongue lay leaden with disgust and horror. Hannibal did not ask about this again, either.

But he thinks of it sometimes, and never admits that he does.

There are more pressing matters that merit his attention.

“You listening?” Will grins, squinting against the springtime sun. Hannibal nods, brows raised. “Bullshit,” decides Will, but not without pleasure. “So we’ll take the traps together, dress together whatever comes. I can handle fishing. And you -”

“The garden,” Hannibal says, running a hand along his brow, slicking his hair back with his own sweat.

How capable they’ve become together. How strong Will’s shoulders curve and how bronzed Hannibal’s skin now glows. How skillfully in synchronicity they work oftentimes without a word between them, each knowing intimately the placement of the other and every movement and motion. Near a year, close as they can reckon it. Hannibal has lost count of the days, so many spent in a haze of moaning kisses and sticky bodies. The house has been fortified, finally, with metal stripped from the rest stop. They have found their rhythm in a world disrupted.

“Tell me again about the plants,” Will says, ducking his head to catch Hannibal’s attention and bring it back. His grin tilts crooked and he curls a hand against Hannibal’s cheek, leaning bare chest to bare chest with only sweat between them, and drawing a kiss across his mouth. “Head in the goddamn clouds today,” murmurs Will.

Hannibal smiles again. “There are a few plants I’ve seen out by the swamp that we’ve been ignoring that we could actually put to use,” he says. “The creeping dogwood has lovely berry-like fruits we can enjoy, and it has a habit - as many wild plants do - of tending itself. It will be close to the shore as well as it likes to cling to the dryer edges. There’s one plant that I saw perhaps half a mile from the house, so it will be easy to gather from.”

“The white and green arrow arum will be good if we learn to cook it,” Hannibal says, shifting his position a little to settle more comfortably. “It’s poisonous if we don’t,”

“Should we avoid it then?”

“It is supposed to be very filling when made properly,” Hannibal counters. “It could be worth the investment to learn.”

“And the stomach ache as we do,” Will replies, and Hannibal grins. “What else?”

“Pontederia cordata,” Hannibal articulates, and Will snorts, lifting an eyebrow. “The seeds are easy to find and the plant is common to our region. Along with being able to eat the seeds raw, we can also grind them up to make flour, and work on making simple bread to host the fish and squirrels you bring home.”

Will shivers straighter as Hannibal’s hands rest on his arms, thumbs following the curves of his biceps. Palm still pressed to his friend’s cheek, Will bites his bottom lip and releases it with a laugh. “You’re incredible,” he tells him.

“I learned from the best.”

“Bullshit,” Will grins, again. “I’d never have put together making bread.”

“But you put together far more than that,” Hannibal says.

“And you made it a damn sight better.” He closes their lips together again, parting only reluctantly to continue marking out with lines dragged through dirt, darkening his bare feet. “So through here, we can plant the beans again. We can use the cattails we dried up to make a wall for them to grow along. That’ll shade some of the herbs that can’t make it in the sun when it gets hotter out.”

“You want to build a structure?”

“Why not? Ain’t seen nobody out here since well before you showed up, and if we keep it wide and flat I don’t imagine it’ll stand out too much,” Will considers, hands on his hips as he looks out over the field, lush green and soft with spring grasses.

“If we give it the appearance of a garden growing wild it will stand out even less,” Hannibal says, smiling. They’ve been in the sun most of the morning, planning and plotting out how they might build a little place for their food to grow. Any organs and bones they wouldn’t eat would go to fertilize them, any plants that died would do the same. Creating a more cultivated circle of life to continue their own.

They have managed well, since Will had trusted Hannibal into his life. They have some of the sweets they took from the service station still stashed away, along with the large plastic bottles of water they refill regularly from their little pool. Hannibal suggested irrigating water from there to their garden but it would be an endeavor they would have to start over the fall - summer was far too hot a time, with rains coming at monsoon strength, to coordinate something so sophisticated.

Their little hovel now stands more secure, with strong supporting beams and a thicker thatch to keep out all but the most insistent of rainstorms. Plastic they dragged from the ravished service station insulates the roof, mud packed with bone and sand and pieces of reeds hold the walls strong. There is more space, now, to store and to sleep, without giving away their abode as anything but a particularly heavy pile of debris and wood.

They’re happy.

Beneath scalding sun and sudden showers, making their bodies sore with work and easing twitching muscles to laxity beneath hands and mouths when the day is done, apart to pursue their separate tasks or grinning at each other across a span of empty space when they reunite, there is scarcely a moment that they do not resonate with hard-won delight in the life they’ve carved hardscrabble for themselves out here alone.

Even when a portion of the house gave way, and they had to abandon all other work for two days to get it stable again.

Even when their traps in winter lay empty and they rationed out what food they dared to settle snarling stomachs.

Even at their lowest moments, Hannibal snarling Lithuanian and Will cursing sharp into the motionless air, they relinquished their strife and grief enough to comfort the other, and find themselves comforted in turn. Will blinks, as Hannibal’s broad familiar hand sets against the small of his back. He turns toward him with a slight smile, rubbing away a blush as Hannibal grins.

“Now who’s stopped paying attention,” he chides, and Will reaches back to swat Hannibal’s hand away. His wrist caught, Will turns laughing and breaks free, only enough to take a step. Strong arms encircle his waist and they topple clumsily together, tussling into and away from kisses, laughing loudly and scrabbling from the other, only to be dragged back again.

“You’re a shit,” laughs Will. “I made lines, goddammit, and now you’ve gone and smudged them. I was thinking, that’s all.”

“That’s all,” Hannibal teases him, pinning Will beneath himself and laying heavier every time Will wriggles towards freedom.

“That’s all,” grunts Will, managing to his belly and clawing helpless at the grass until he simply goes limp, muttering into the soil. “Thinking about rope. Not enough sinews to make up a trellis for plants, and we need them for the house. If we can get some milkweed out of the marsh, might could strip it and twist it up. You just gonna lay there?”

“Yes,” Hannibal replies, settling comfortably atop his friend, arms crossed against his shoulders, chin resting atop. He can hold Will easily, now, as they have learned through many games together. Only in the water does Will manage to squirm away and get his revenge with relentless splashing. “I just might.”

“What a day wasted,” Will considers.

“Hardly. I get to enjoy the warmth of the sun on my back and the warmth of my friend beneath me. I call it quite a worthy pursuit.”

Will snorts, managing an arm beneath his cheek to rest against and hide his smile there. “Well,” he sighs, “how goddamn nice for you.”

“Very nice.”

“Fantastic.”

“A lovely way to enjoy the day.”

This time Will’s snort fails to mask his low laugh, nor does his arm suffice to keep captive his begrudging pleasure when Hannibal runs a hand through his hair. Shorn short by Will’s knife, it’s fluffed wild with cottony curls still, and scruff shadows across both their cheeks, shaved precariously careful with that same blade. Will tilts his head just enough to lay a baleful little look on Hannibal, but he can feel his eyes drawn up in a smile that shows only there.

“You know what I’d never before presumed of you?” Will asks after a moment.

“What’s that?”

“That’d you be such a stubborn shit.”

“I never presumed you’d take to cursing so much,” Hannibal offers in return. “Terribly rude.”

Will grins. “If we’re both grown enough to keep this whole place from getting washed away, I reckon we’re both grown enough to handle a bit of swearing.” He pauses, licking wind-chapped lips, and feigns an attempt at wriggling again. “And other things,” he adds, with a seemingly careless shrug.

“You’re insatiable,” Hannibal tells him, setting his hands on either side of Will’s shoulders and pushing himself up to allow Will to wriggle and lay on his back before he settles again. “Entirely greedy. We had planned to mark out the garden today...”

“Which we did, and then you rolled around in the lines and messed it all up,” Will agrees with a nod.

“And check the traps,” Hannibal adds, as though Will had not interrupted him. “And see if any of the bull grapes have ripened enough to dry for the winter.”

“We’ll have to mind them if we get rain,” Will considers, though his distraction blossoms pink beneath his eyes and stiff inside his belly. “By winter, we could have raisin bread,” he says, his squirming stilled with the revelation.

“We could make preserves with the fresh ones.”

“Do you know how to make preserves?” Will asks, brow raised.

“We can figure it out.”

“Need jars for that.”

Hannibal hums his assent, and gaze turned distant as if in consideration, Will’s grin spreads sputtering into a laugh as Hannibal’s hand cascades absently down his side. Beneath Will’s bottom, firm fingers curl and spread Will’s leg out from beneath Hannibal’s heavy body. It’s so slow as to seem nearly an afterthought, so languid that both play as if neither have noticed nor enacted this subtle shift in movement.

“Supposed to build another drying rack today,” Will notes, dry, his brow raised as if in challenge.

“Were we?”

“It was your idea,” Will reminds him as Hannibal slips his other hand down to spread Will’s other leg around him as well, gazing into the middle distance as though he’s doing nothing at all. 

“How frightfully dull, I’m sorry I suggested it.”

“It’s terrible you care about our survival.”

“I care far more about how well we live,” Hannibal counters, coy, and rests more comfortably between Will’s spread legs. “And living and survival are fundamentally different.”

“I’m not sure I agree with that,” Will says, brow creased but in consideration more than consternation. “Seems like the same thing to me. Can’t live if you don’t survive.”

“Precisely so. But what’s the purpose in survival if one doesn’t have a chance to live?”

“Then you’ve not survived.”

Hannibal evaluates his position - in every sense of the word - with a resonant hum. Will lifts his legs just to squeeze his thighs to Hannibal’s hips, tilting his head away as Hannibal’s sunburnt nose draws against his jaw. “Think of it as work and play, then,” he says. “Why do we work?”

“So we don’t fuckin’ die,” snorts Will, grinning wide.

“And so that maybe we’ll have days when we can play, without need for work,” he says. “This,” he asks, lips parting against Will’s ear and closing against the lobe. A single suckle pulls Will’s body taut with a soft sound. “Is this survival? Or is it living?”

Will grabs a fistful of Hannibal’s hair to keep him right where he is, fingers slicking through the thin film of sweat on Hannibal’s bare back. “Both. God,” he laughs, helpless. “Both.”

“Are you saying you can’t survive without me?” Hannibal teases, pulling shivers up and down Will’s back from breathing into his ear. 

“You’re such a fucking sap.”

“I don’t think I could survive without you,” Hannibal replies, unfazed. “Or live, for that matter. You leave and I’ll walk into a swamp again, or eat green arrow arum without cooking it, in my sorrow.”

“Stop,” Will laughs, wriggling beneath him, wrapping himself further around Hannibal at the same time.

“You keep squirming like that and you’ll wiggle us right back to the front door,” Hannibal warns him.

“You gonna lay on me the whole way there?”

“I’m curious to see what would happen if I did.”

“I’ll kick your ass as soon as I’m out from under you,” grunts Will, squinting as Hannibal grins at him, crooked teeth and all. “You didn’t mean that, did you?”

“About laying on you? I did.”

“About the swamp,” Will says. “The green arrow. You didn’t mean that.”

He can see the truth of it, even as he protests. There is a shadow across Hannibal’s eyes like a stray cloud across the sun to even consider such a fate as their separation, by distance or death or anything else. Hannibal draws a breath to speak but Will stops his squirming and sets dusty hands to Hannibal’s cheeks.

“Bullshit,” he says, laughing once when Hannibal squints at the curse. “I mean it. If something happens, and God knows a bad rain could unseat us all off into the swamp, then you’d best carry on. I didn’t teach you all this shit for you to wilt away like goddamn orchid.”

“Orchids are temperamental things,” Hannibal points out. “Bloom only when in their most contented state. If repotted they will spend a long time adjusting to their new environment and putting out roots before considering flowering again, if they ever do.”

“Is there anything you don’t know?” Will laughs.

“How to fly,” Hannibal replies, grinning, before he bends to kiss his friend.

Will doesn’t argue that. He laughs against Hannibal’s mouth and smears a dusty kiss against him, softening their lips from sun-dry to humid heat. In the guise of a thrust Will manages Hannibal to his back and shoves him back to the soil, breaking their kiss just long enough to grin. There is truth in Hannibal’s words, beyond his incapability for flight. They are both of them more delicate than they give themselves to considering, and yet here they have flowered, glorious and bright. Content and secure in the home they work so happily hard to maintain, flourishing in the presence of the other just as certain blossoms only grow near certain trees.

Will wonders how he managed so goddamn long without Hannibal. He kisses him harder as he wonders too how long he could have kept it up, had he any idea what he was missing. Their brows meet and their breath rattles between them.

“Alright,” Will sighs. “Alright. Fuck it. Work today’ll be work tomorrow just like every day.”

“Spring?” Hannibal asks, hands against Will’s wrists, lips curved to another kiss.

“Spring,” grins Will, delighted.

They can live for a day, rather than just survive. Splash and cool themselves and kiss and touch, using mouths and hands and reveling in a breath of freedom hard-earned. There will be work tomorrow. Work the next day.

Work the days after, as the sun brings flourishing forth near untameable life that seems mirror to their own. They strive now beyond sustenance and into longer plans, able together to not just keep the other scarcely alive but to plan for times that will be leaner, improving their lot with every plant they grow and food they preserve and bolstering building to strengthen their home. It’s good.

It’s damn good.

Tired as they are, torn as their hands become, inch by inch and leaf by leaf and day by day they lay house-proud claim to their land, their garden, and catch it all in the little Coca-Cola bottle as they go. A lock of the first rope they make from milkweed. A few seeds from new plants brought into their husbandry. A portion of a wrapper from one of their Moonpies.

It sits beside their bed, and both nightly wonder at what other things will come to slowly fill its empty space.

By winter, they have a small storage space made up just beneath the ceiling, for the heavier items that would otherwise make the floor impossible to move across. More pieces of metal shelving they have now cleverly learned to bend and construct to their needs, some pieces of timber that, come the spring, they will use to fortify the back of their little home that faces out into the swamps beyond and some of the floor beneath the mattress.

It’s comfortable, though cold, and they only venture out to check certain traps, relieve themselves and get more water from the pool. In their insulated little home they wash when the water is no longer freezing, dry the other with the towels they’ve gathered and kept, sleep curled up together and whisper by the light of a tallow lamp. They hole up like bears in their burrows and sleep as much as they can.

Hannibal has no idea what time it is when he wakes, it’s always dark in their home, but he knows immediately the sensation of _wrongness_ that seeps like a bad smell through the crack at the top of the door. He stares at it and tries to keep his breathing steady, but still Will wakes beneath him, making a soft sound askance before Hannibal folds his fingers against Will’s lips and drops his eyes, shaking his head just once.

Like animals, their skin prickles not from cold but from alarm. Like animals, encroached upon in their bower, they bristle in anticipation. Will’s heart beats too loudly in his ears for him to hear but the unmistakable crunch of a footstep is loud as a gunshot.

It could be a creature, but one so big as to lay that weight upon the earth?

It could be a beast, but one that scrapes a hand across the door to their home?

Will gropes blindly for his knife, and as its blade tilts their bottle to floor, their world ends a second time.

The door kicked in with a whoop sends their gathered goods scattering. Hannibal jerks back from Will, Will from he, both braced with their backs against branched walls stabbing sharp into their spines. Eyes obscured behind motorcycle goggles glinting dark, leather straps shedding age, the man in front of them is no wanderer, no aimless settler, no normal person. Armored in baking sheets and bent hardened leather, gums receded across sharpened teeth, Will’s knees sink but only before he uses vertigo to impel himself and blade forward with a shout.

The blade isn’t fully avoided, and with a shout, the man catches Will by the hair and tosses him out the broken door into the cold late afternoon glow beyond. Hannibal watches in silence, stunned into immobility until the man with the goggles turns his head and tilts it at him next. It’s surreal, not being able to see his face and read it. Hannibal squirms to get out of the way and freezes again when he hears a helpless snarl from outside.

“Best you come out, boyle.” A drawl, heavily accented, slips through past the man barring Hannibal’s way. “Or your pretty friend here ain’t gonna be pretty much longer.”

Hannibal lunges for the shotgun, but he’s too far and the older man is faster and he jerks it away with a laugh, pitching it out to whomever is behind. Caught by the back of the neck, Hannibal is dragged stumbling from their home, their sanctuary, the place they built for themselves, its inviolable peace now unfathomably destroyed. Hannibal drops to his knees as he staggers forward, watching as Will shouts and lunges after his knife, jerked from his hand but not without catching one of them across the arm. Will’s bones clack brittle as he’s grabbed by the wrist and turned to his back, the wail of pain snared in his throat and dulled to only a gasp.

“Don’t,” says the man with the accent, Will’s knife pointed towards Hannibal the moment his muscles move in reaction. “Stay right where you are.”

Five of them, all in fortified garments and good boots and guns at their sides. Five of them here, here instead of anywhere else in the enormous world. Five of them here, against two.

“Run,” Will whispers. Eyes wide and watering, he blinks past tears of pain and grimaces as his wrist bent all at wrong angles is pinned almost gently beneath the booted foot of one of the raiders.

“Now I’d not suggest that if you’ve got any brains you wanna keep inside your heads,” says one of the other men, drawl dripping thick and native Southern. “This ain’t no way to greet guests, is it?”

“Take anything,” Will snarls, but his eyes never leave Hannibal. Pleading, pleading for him to _run_ between his words, begging amidst his babbled bargaining. “Whatever you want, there’s - there’s more, there’s food. I can show you, take whatever you want, just -”

“Well this here is where we hit a bit of a miscommunication, as they call it, between y’all and us. Food’s all well and good-like, but food comes and goes. Someone could see a buck out in the forest and not have the skill to shoot it, and only scare it away. No, what we need is more than the food that will come in time. More than your meagre little trifles all up in there. No, we need someone with the _skill_ so that food always comes our way regardless of seasons or time.”

The man spits, a dirty shot of saliva against the mud by Will’s face, and Will turns away, frowning and trembling, fist clenched where his arm has been twisted. His skin, still paler than Hannibal’s despite how long both spend in the sun, filthies with the cold mud against it. He’s growing colder, dressed in nothing more than his underpants. Hannibal watches only him.

“We’re not hunters,” Hannibal whispers, looking up. “We only gather from traps we set, we don’t know anything about killing.”

“Who said anything ‘bout killing, boyle?” the one with the foreign accent interjects. “We’re civilized folk. Want nothing more than a trade.”

“A trade?” Hannibal frowns. “What would you want to trade with us?”

“No,” Will says. “No, don’t -” The boot against his broken wrist bears down deeper into the muck. He grimaces, teeth bared, hissing only pain.

Hannibal folds his hands together to squeeze and hold still his shaking.

“Ain’t even heard our offer yet,” sighs the one standing above Will.

The Southerner with Will’s knife turns it over in his hand, filthy fingers splayed against the blade. Will bucks upward, ripping skin against the bottom of the boot that holds him. His lunge as he scrambles is met with fierce arms around his middle and a sickening smack that stops anything but a guttural sob. _Run_ , Hannibal can hear him plead. _Run_.

“We’ll let you both live,” continues the man, unbothered entirely by the commotion, “in exchange for whichever one of y’all opened that door at the gas station. That one’ll come with us. The other gets to stay right here. Real simple.”

Hannibal blinks, lips parting, gaze held on his friend as he’s dropped coughing to the ground again.

“Me,” Will says, past busted lip and broken nose. “Me, I did it. I opened it.”

“Shut up,” snarls one of the other men, one who hasn’t spoken yet. He cleans his teeth with a fingernail, occasionally checking what he’s found before returning to the grotesque activity.

“Didja, sweetheart?” the Irishman asks Will, stepping closer to him. Will curls in on himself, but the man hardly finds that an imposition, grasping him by the chin and turning him back. “You’re so, so pretty. Rare you get something so pretty that’s also smart. You know what we do with pretty things?”

Will narrows his eyes and clasps his hurt wrist with his other hand. He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even move his head. He swallows some of the blood that slips over his lips and tries to keep breathing.

“Now I’ve half a mind to believe you, for no other reason than if you turn out to be a liar, I get you all to myself ‘til you can’t make those sweet little sounds no more,” he grins. “But my boys here, they need some pesky doors open. And though they’ll share in the fun for a while, a sweet ass only gets us so far. So.” He adjusts his grip on Will’s chin, squeezing hard enough for him to make a small sobbing plea again. “I’ll change the rules a little bit. You tell me the truth, sweetheart, or both you and your sweet boy there will find yourselves in a real murky place for a while.”

“He didn’t do it,” Hannibal answers softly, before Will can. “He didn’t do it. He helped. I picked the lock, and I can do it again.”

“No,” Will whispers. Then he gasps. Then he shouts, “No! It wasn’t him, don’t tell them it was you. It was only me, it wasn’t you -”

Hannibal draws a breath and talks of tumblers and spring clips, pins and posts and mounting plates. Every word he says chokes in Will’s throat, every word he says holds the attention of their captors a little longer. Finally, the one that seems to lead them lifts Will’s knife to quiet Hannibal, and the Irishman releases Will who curls to his side and aches against the earth.

“They’re gonna eat you,” he sobs.

Hannibal says nothing. He shifts closer, uncaring for how menacing the men look standing in a half-circle around the two of them, and draws Will up into his lap to cradle him close.

“ _They won’t_ ,” he whispers in French. “ _They won’t, Will, not when they need me_.”

“ _And then?_ ”

“ _And then we’ll see, hmm?_ ” Hannibal strokes the delicate curls that rest against Will’s forehead. He memorizes every little detail because he will come back and he will see Will again and hold him close and kiss him again. He will. He will open their damn doors and get them what they want and then he will go home. 

There are only so many doors someone can open.

Only so many doors before you find the destiny you have and no amount of lock picking will get you out of there, and no amount of backtracking will get you home. Hannibal just holds to Will and thinks of home, this home, that is theirs, that will always be theirs. And when he’s grabbed by the shoulders and hauled up, Hannibal doesn’t struggle, he watches Will, he makes sure no one touches or hurts him as the other four men inevitably move into their little home to wreck it apart and take what they want. He watches him as Will looks up at him in turn and he repeats over and over that he will find him again, he will find him again, he will.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Where is he?”_
> 
> _“Hell if I know. Ain’t my business to know. Stick this one down with the others and when the warlord’s ready, we’ll drag him up again so he can tell the man himself what he’s done.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Boy, they call him.

Not by his name.

Not by any slur either.

Just boy.

It’s almost worse that way - dehumanizing, stripping him down to his barest parts. They call him that when they load him into the caravan. They call him that when he stands upon the jolting bed of the truck jumping unsteady over broken asphalt. They call him that when he lunges and finds skin beneath his teeth and tearing vessels that stretch and snap and spray wet heat across his face.

They call him that when the man whose throat he tore out dies, guttering gurgling to cessation.

They call him that when they beat him so badly he can do no more than weep silent as every jostling movement of the transport makes his body scream.

They call him that as they drag him from the truck and across dusty earth, with others like him in tow. Through blurred vision, he can make out scarlet firelight burning bold in the early evening. Fires are meant to be hidden - he, Boy now, knows that intrinsically - but these ones brighten the night as if in challenge to any who would see them there and dare approach.

They drag him up a flight of marble stairs, worn concave in the middle by endless generations of feet walking up and down them. They drag him through an enormous wooden door, thatched up from the inside with pieces of heavy oak and parts of benches, keeping the door entirely secure when it’s closed.

When Boy looks up, he can’t even see where the ceiling ends, it’s so high. 

As without, within is lit by fire. Fire in huge metal goblets, fire in candelabras, fire in small pits dotted along the edge of the enormous space. Some holes have men around them, others have lumps of cloth that could be anything or anyone. The place smells like human breath too long contained and too infrequently cleaned. It’s stifling and heavy. The boy stumbles and he’s cursed at as he’s dragged in further.

His vision is broken, a blur as if looking up through water. Now and then a shape becomes clear, but his eyes are swollen nearly closed and his mouth burns with coppery blood. He spits against the floor just to clear his throat and finds himself thrown to cracked wooden boards for his trouble.

“Now, now,” purrs a man with an Irish accent. “None of that now, boyle. This is a church you’re in. A sacred fuckin’ space. Show some respect, boy.”

On his back he’s pulled by his wrists, clothes caught and torn against the jagged splinters beneath. Maybe his family is here, and the thought sparks a wildfire within him. Maybe this is where they’ve been taken too, and choking down a fresh gout of blood from his bottom lip, he calls out for his mother. He calls out for his father.

He doesn’t have a chance to ask for his sister before he’s smothered by a filthy hand smeared across his lips.

“If you’re going to keep carrying on, we’ll feast on your tongue for supper,” he’s warned. “You won’t need it for what’s coming to you, anyway.”

Raucous laughter bursts loud around him and the boy wonders what he’s done to deserve this. Before he tore the throat out of the man who first grabbed him, before they broke into the home he shared in peace, having done no one any harm, intending to do none to anyone. A splinter digs against his leg and he hisses, jerking his legs up from the floor and is pulled to stand again by his captors.

He sees no women here, no children. Only men in dour dark forms, lit scarlet by their fires. White-rimmed eyes flash with passing interest towards him as he’s brought inward towards the pulpit. He’s not the first to be dragged through like this. He will not be the last.

“Fuck,” sighs one of the men holding his lax body firm. “He ain’t here.”

“Where is he?”

“Hell if I know. Ain’t my business to know. Stick this one down with the others and when the warlord’s ready, we’ll drag him up again so he can tell the man himself what he’s done.”

The boy is tugged again and struggles, weathers a slap and struggles some more, weak sounds falling from his lips until another hand slaps hard over his mouth to keep him quiet and a thumb presses against his nose to cut off his air. The boy wriggles as he can, held tight like this, but moment by moment his vision blurs darker and darker, and moment by moment he lets his weight rest against the man behind him.

\---

Awake.

Cold and awake and bare, the boy scrambles up from where he lay folded on the cold concrete ground and pushes himself back until his shoulders hit a wall. It’s dark here, and after a few moments all he can see, still, is his breath before him. He isn’t bound. He isn’t restrained in any way. He is free, more or less, to move of his own free will.

He raises brown eyes to the ceiling, listening to the murmurs that pass through the ancient floors, following the heavy footsteps around and around until he grows dizzy trying to count the pairs of feet he hears. Instead, he directs his attention down to the room he’s in, making out shapes here, too, some of which move with short breaths, twitch in ways that can’t be comfortable asleep or awake.

Perhaps this is where the women and children are. Perhaps this is where the slaves are kept before they’re killed. Perhaps the boy’s asleep and just can’t seem to wake himself, no matter how hard he tries. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Something close to him moves and involuntarily the boy cries out and shrinks away, gathering himself as close as possible, arms over his bent knees, lips pressed to them.

He shoves a hand through his hair, blonde strands caked with mud made from the endless rain. The clothes that clung to him like second skin are gone, he trembles from the chill of creaking floorboards and the hard cinderblock wall scraping his back. The body that shifted beside his own unfurls to sprawl across the floor, a man not much older than himself in age but far more so in body. Sore joints stiffen slowly to a stretch. Aching muscles curve glinting in the dim light that filters down from above.

“What’s your name?”

The boy shakes his head, squeezing his lips together. It doesn’t matter now what his name was, his name now has been given to him and beaten in with fists and boots.

“Boy?” the man asks. “We’re all that here.”

“Even the women?”

It’s a foolish question, but earns him a sound something like laughter before a wracking cough curls the man’s body into a bend. He slumps back again and hums low, hands set against his belly.

“Never seen one here. Hell if I know where they take them.”

The boy bites his lip carefully and curls into himself further.

“Nor children neither,” the man continues. “How old are you anyway?”

The boy shakes his head again and the man leaves it at that. It hardly matters when they’re all in this basement, cold and hungry and thin and waiting for the devil knows what. The man adjusts his position and closes his eyes to rest again. The boy doesn’t move from where he’s curled, trying to keep whatever parts of himself warm that he can.

He counts near a dozen people down here, all in different positions of repose. Some look more twisted up than others, some have shadows that fall wrong, but he convinces himself that it’s nothing more than his childish imagination, nothing more than his fears of everything and nothing at all playing up.

“Where are we?” the boy asks, and the man softly snorts against the floor.

“Fuck if I know. A church. Hundreds of churches in Louisiana. Still in the state, since we ain’t gone so far as to be in another. Fuck if I know,” he says again.

“Why are they keeping us?”

“I’d tell you to guess,” he says, “but I wager you already know. Put it this way, they’re not keeping us for company.”

“But that can’t be true.”

“Hmm?”

“That there are people out here who…”

“You were born after it happened, right?” 

The boy nods, and the man doesn’t pry further than that. “You don’t know what it was like before. When you could walk to a shop and say hello to your neighbors and get food. When you could sit out at night on your porch and watch fireflies and not fear someone coming after you just for having a house that looked safer than their own.”

The boy’s throat clicks in the suffocating silence of this place, its noiseless dark penetrated only by their low murmured speech and the thud of boots upstairs, by the occasional raucous laugh cracking sharply from the church above.

“People have gone bad,” the man says, draping an arm across his brow, hand curled to a loose fist. “Something in the air after it occurred. Something in the water. Lack of food and lack of shelter and everyone fighting too goddamn hard to get one up on the next man to stop and gather ourselves together again. People can rot just like food. And these ones are as foul as can be.”

The boy nods and curls his fingers over his toes to warm them a little, saying nothing as he lets the information process. He knows the men are bad, he felt it when they tugged him away from the place he felt safest. He knows they’re cruel, when they beat him into submission instead of answering his fearful questions. He knows they’re rotten, because no human being should be this revoltingly delighted by violence.

“Who’s the warlord?” the boy asks next. There’s shifting around them, now, as his conversation with the man on the ground stirs people awake. “What does he want?”

“He runs this whole rabble,” the man replies, turning to spit to his side before laying on his back again. “The longer I take to meet him the happier I’ll be. And you too, kid. Don’t you go rushing up to try talk sense into a madman.”

“They want me to talk to him,” the boy replies.

“They want you to? The hell for?”

“So I can tell him what I did.”

This is enough for the man to lower his arm from over his eyes, just a little, just enough to regard the boy who focuses only on rubbing heat into his toes again.

“What did you do?”

“I killed one of them,” the boy says, though he feels neither shame nor pleasure. His stomach roils unpleasantly all the same, and he rubs the back of his hand against his mouth when the taste of blood wells up again. “One of those that took me.”

“Shit,” sighs the man. “How?”

“Bit his throat out.”

With a low whistle, the man lays back. His fingers twitch in seemingly unconscious movements, rhythmically closing and opening again and again. “I ain’t seen him, but I can’t imagine that -”

The door through which they came bangs open wide with a gout of laughter. Two men descend the stairs and those held captive in this cellar draw back against the walls as if to blend with shadows. The man pushes upward, shoving back on his heels against the boy, pinning him into the corner. Breath shortened, the boy doesn’t fight it. He doesn’t move.

One of the two had brought the boy here, the other is one he hasn’t seen before. Lithe and tall and far too clean to be part of this endeavor, yet here he is. Without a word, the two start shifting people around, ignoring their noises of fear or displeasure, silencing the loudest with slaps or strikes against bare skin. One by one they circle until they reach the man in the corner and the boy behind him.

“Wiseguy.”

The man in front of the boy tilts his head. “Asshole.”

It’s enough to earn him a harsh backhand and a yank by his hair away from the boy he’s protecting. He’s paralyzed, watching the man he’d talked to, the man who gave him time, saw him as more than a thing and more than a suggestion of age and gender. The boy goes without fighting, though his eyes remain wide and huge looking back at the man who watches him, presses his lips together to squeeze blood to them before licking them clean. He raises a hand and the boy has no time to raise one to him in return.

“Take another one down!” the man calls to him as the ground slides away beneath the boy’s feet, and he’s pulled up by his arms.

Body bumping against the steps, he scrabbles to dig in his heels and stop himself from being flayed across the coarse floorboards. The forms who before sat in muttering stillness around their fires now have turned toward him. He can scarcely make them out in the seeping darkness, the blinding flames, the blur of his vision that renders it all untenable to track. At the center of the church, before the pulpit, he’s let to drop to his knees - made to, in fact, by hard hands against his shoulders.

He daren’t raise his eyes to meet those he feels pressing against him.

But he recalls the man’s words, the cruelty that tore him from his home, how little guilt at all he feels in fighting for his life. And the boy lifts his swollen face and stares hard at the man splayed across the dais before him. In an enormous chair, long legs crossed and wide shoulders made wider still by the breadth of thick leather epaulets across his body, the warlord - as pale blonde and slender-featured as himself - watches in interest as the boy heaves his hatred up from his depths…

...and spits, hard, against the steps to the pulpit.

The warlord doesn’t move, he doesn’t give the boy a look of disgust, he doesn’t stand, offended, to walk towards him. He does nothing, he merely watches. After a moment he uncrosses his legs and sets his feet wide, leaning over them to rest his elbows on his knees.

“How did it taste?” he asks, tone warm and voice quiet enough that those standing at the back of the church shuffle forward to hear better. “The blood of the man you tore apart?”

“Hot,” the boy answers. He thinks of his little family, torn asunder, to give him strength. “Metallic,” he adds. He thinks of their home, shared and safe, to give him courage. “Like I was stronger than him,” he finally says, fighting down the quiver in his voice and fisting his hands against his bare and quaking thighs. “Because I lived longer than him, at least.”

The warlord for a moment more is motionless, but through the haze the boy can make out the sharp curve of teeth flashing white past parted lips.

“Why, then, should I allow one so vicious to remain amongst us? It was a ruthless thing you did,” he says. “Savage.”

The boy shakes his head, brows furrowed and lips pouted as he can feel the anger in himself boil. “I’m nothing like you.”

“You can learn.”

“I don’t want to learn.”

The warlord clicks his tongue and sits back again, setting his left ankle against his right knee and pressing his fingers to his teeth as he smiles wide. He watches the boy before him, no longer bloody but still bruised, naked, cold and little. Much too frail for a boy his age.

“Go, then,” he says at last, and the boy blinks at him, confused. There are murmuring amidst the crowd, silenced to stark stillness by the mere lift of the warlord’s fingers.

“But you brought me here,” the boy says, even as he drags himself trembling upward. “You - you destroyed everything, you brought me here!”

“You’d be wise not to question a turn of fate in your favor,” warns the warlord. Another twist of his fingers finds the boy’s things thrown at his feet, the weight of swelling in his face dizzying as he ducks to shuffle back into his clothes. “You remind me of myself.”

“I’m not like you,” the boy says again, even as he fights to keep his hands still enough to button his pants and pull on his shirt. Even as he backs towards the door and amidst him the men who stole him step back. “I’m nothing like you.”

“Then endeavor to remain as such,” the warlord says. “And understand why, as such a mirror, were you to stay, I’d have no choice but to see you shattered.”

The boy glares again, hugging his shoes to himself, too scared to stop now to put them on, and turns to walk quickly towards the door of the church. He struggles with it a moment, the weight too much for his small form, but then he manages, just enough to slip through before the door slams shut again, echoing in the silence that follows.

At length, one of the men steps forward.

“It is unwise to question me,” the warlord murmurs, not letting his eyes move from the door and the boy beyond most likely hopping into his shoes to run before he changes his mind. “When you lost one of my men to a child.”

“Your law is a life for a life,” the man says.

“Of my own for my own,” comes the drawled reply as the lord sits back in his chair and tilts his head enough for his neck to crack quietly. “Had your man lost his throat to a wolf, you would kill it. You wouldn’t drag it here for me to see. Should you, ever, I would find it far more worthy of praise than of killing.” He slips his gaze to the man beside him. “He did survive longer than the man he killed, after all.”

The response is immediate and faltering, a whipcrack hiss of words cut short behind clenched teeth. The man’s hands flex at his sides and the warlord watches all at once, and nothing in particular, seeing everything and responding to nothing. That’s what it seems to him, all of this, the ugliness and terror and gore and strife.

Nothing at all.

No more worth notice than the attention paid to passing clouds or the whispered scent of rain heated from sun-scorched earth.

“We’re running low,” the man murmurs to his warlord, low enough that none of those in observation can hear. “And the men are becoming impatient.”

“For shelter? For food, which remains plentiful? For security,” the warlord asks, and the man shakes his head, sucking his lips between his teeth and searching between dark auburn eyes as he’s forced to say the words.

“For company,” he says. “And that boy -”

“Was a boy. A child. Need I make my feelings clear on this again? We’ll find our food stores replenished in haste,” the warlord says, words clipped short enough that the man cows, head ducked. He will not fight this battle alone, and a skirting glance dusted fleeting across those assembled makes it clear he would be waging a war as one man against many, no matter how they mutter and complain in private.

“There’s another,” the man says. “It can wait ‘til morning, if you’d rather -”

The warlord lifts a hand, and curves it elegantly. With no more than that, a nod to two men waiting near, a hiss of whispered words amongst those who reside here, they go to fetch the next. Hard heels hit against the floor, and the warlord winces as the door beneath bangs open again with a whoop of delight.

The man seated in the cellar has yet to drop his fingers from his mouth, lost in the sensation of his own relief against them, to have heard the church-front door open and close and nary a gunshot, nary warcries of blood spilled, nary a struggle scraping furious against the floor. They let him go. They let that fearful brave boy flee and the captive could weep for his relief, even as gnarled hands grasp his wrists and pull him upward.

He doesn’t struggle against this, his anger isn’t for them. They are nothing but maggots following the scent of fresh meat. He gets his feet under himself for the steps and goes as he’s pulled, stumbling only when they shove him to kneel, and catching himself before he does. He lifts his eyes and grins, bright and wide, teeth bared in a snarl against the man who brought him here.

“Missing your boys?”

The warlord regards the captive with little interest, turning his head slightly towards the man at his side to hear his conviction. A sniper, apparently. Four men in a party done, one bullet to the head each, no waste, no fuss, no mess, apparently.

Clever boy.

“I have fewer mouths to feed, now,” he replies.

“And fewer mouths to let your men ruin.”

“Yes,” the warlord says, brows raised. “Yes, one less, though you’re ill-advised to remind them of such considering the tenor of the room. By the stroke of your tongue…”

The man’s brows raise, and his gaze is so sharp that the warlord is taken aback. He shows nothing, reveals nothing but the wall of inscrutable righteousness that all here have come to know and fear in him, but he is penetrated. Gouged deep as lightning-strike furrows in the earth by the man who sees through him entirely.

“By the stroke of your tongue,” continues the warlord, “it sounds as if you are willing to take the place that boy might have held.”

“Or what?”

“Or we’ll taste it in another way,” the warlord snarls, and at this, there is a sudden and violent eruption of noise akin to an earthquake rattling violent the tender floorboards and failing walls around them. Cheering and howling, all doubts erased by the promise of sex or food or both, in turn. Their loyalty returned by mere threat and clever turns of phrase alone, the warlord raises his hand to bring them to a tittering quiet. Their energy seems to vibrate the air itself now, as before him kneels this haggard man, his skin tanned thin against his bones that rise in fire-bright curves. He wears a vast and filthy beard. His hair is thick and matted dense. He has wandered for a long time.

And he has found himself here, kneeling at the feet of the warlord who holds his fate in his hands.

“If you want me to beg -”

“I don’t,” the warlord answers with an errant shrug, to uproarious laughter.

“I won’t,” the man says anyway. “My only goddamn regret is that the others fled like chickenshit before I could scope them, too.”

The warlord considers him and the tip of a pink tongue sneaks out to wet his lips before he stands, taking the stairs in slow deliberate strides before he sinks to be on eye level with his prisoner. The man spits at him. The warlord slaps him just as sharply before raising a brow.

“Perhaps I will soften that tongue before others get a taste of it,” he decides, to a rising cheer of the men around the room. He snares a hand in the long hair and tugs the man closer, until he has no choice but to catch his balance splayed on all fours, still snarling and hissing his displeasure at the lord before him.

“Fuck you.”

A low laugh is his only answer as the warlord stands and drags him forward, and he has no choice but to follow like a dog, crawling and slipping after him on the cold wooden floor. He goes limp and the warlord can hardly be bothered by the display of disobedience, the bared teeth towards his men, the rude curses spat hissing as they cheer and holler. Over stiff splinters, the warlord drags the man back towards his chambers, stopped at his door only by his next in rank, who stood beside him on the dais.

The prisoner curls his body and thrashes, and the warlord glances toward him only to see how many hairs he felt rip free in his fist. Not enough for the man to free himself, and so he looks back to the raider at his side.

“Can we dress another one?” the man asks. “There’s a settlement not far off, other side of the river, but for now that’ll be enough to -”

“Do as you need,” the warlord answers. “Only as you need.”

The man ducks his head in thanks and sighs relief, the flare of turmoil once again soon to subside with these acquiescences.

“Thank you, Hannibal,” says the raider, before he steps past the squirming prisoner on the floor, and the warlord jerks his captive into his chambers.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“There is no God,” whispers the man, arching upward from the bed. “No God would let you do what you do without retribution.” The warlord comes close again. In his pants and nothing more, bare-chested and shining with motor oil and filth, warpaint smeared in a fat black greasy streak across his eyes, he stands above the man and lets himself be seen._
> 
> _“What a comforting thought that must be,” Hannibal considers, “rather than that He cares nothing whatsoever for His creations.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

No sooner does the heavy door thud closed than Hannibal releases his prisoner. Hair falls to the floor from his fingers, dense unclean curls. The man hurt himself in his struggle, and the thought is satisfying, considering his sharp tongue and brave words in the main hall. The warlord hardly cares for the scrambling of the young man at his feet as he shucks off his heavy leather coat. Across the chair desk, he tosses it, a thick smack as it lands. He spreads and curls his fingers before following the crawling creature to grasp him again.

“Clever, courageous little thing, how did you get caught?”

The young man tries to twist away, survival instincts turning him savage, and Hannibal slaps him hard enough to stun the breath from him. Hardened arms around his middle, he snares up the man and drags him thrashing to the bed. Tossing him into it and setting a strong hand to one delicate wrist to hold, he bears down on the man despite to struggle. 

“Were I given to speculation, it seems as if you wished to be captured,” Hannibal sighs. He pulls free the wound strap that keep his forearm bracer in place, and loops it around the man’s wrist it to bind his arm to the bedpost. Leather slaps the wall each time he circles it. “Bored, perhaps, after so long sitting in trees and watching, never participating.”

“You’re a monster,” the man whispers.

“Duly noted,” Hannibal sighs. Setting his weight carefully, he sits not across the man’s belly but over his hips, possessed of the knowledge that without freedom of movement there, he can do little more than writhe. Hannibal gropes past weakened blows to grasp the man’s other arm and bind it in kind. He pulls the leather tighter than necessary, and the man chokes back a sound of pain as the leather bites into his skin. “What a relief it must be for you to know that you will never grow older than a week hence, and risk becoming like me.”

“Never,” the man finally whispers, his skin gone chill from the shock. Pain, perhaps. Hannibal rests a hand against his belly, the backs of his fingers rather than the front, and makes a considering sound. He’ll live, until Hannibal decides he will not.

“Will you attempt to kick me, if I leave your limbs - “

“Yes.”

Hannibal inclines his head, gratitude for the honesty. He moves smoothly from astride the man and seeks out bondage to fetter an ankle, too, until the man lays splayed and spread and unable to do more than hiss his breath and narrow his spiteful eyes. Only one leg, bound, the other thus free to force his body wide. Hannibal steps back to unlace his boots.

Leaning back against the desk where his coat lies, he sets them neatly beside. “You know this building was once used for worship. Every little household from miles and miles around would descend upon it to gamble their futures in the hands of a God that they hoped would no longer neglect them. There are records dating back a century, but always the same names. None of them were able, through prayer and penance, to save their families from their poverty. None of them were chosen by their God to relieve their dutiful suffering.”

“What are you going to do to me,” the man asks, though from the dour set of his jaw, Hannibal’s certain he knows. He blinks toward him, and continues unlacing his armor, laying it across the desk.

“This room in particular belonged to the parish priest. He was the first of us to unify those who sought salvation, his chambers well-kept, his needs attended even as others starved. Even when the end of days came upon them, the people protected him. Even when their mortal coils shrank battered from the world’s rejection of them, they ensured that he was safe. Their conduit, to a God who watched them die without intercession, one by one by one.”

“There is no God,” whispers the man, arching upward from the bed. “No God would let you do what you do without retribution.” The warlord comes close again. In his pants and nothing more, bare-chested and shining with motor oil and filth, warpaint smeared in a fat black greasy streak across his eyes, he stands above the man and lets himself be seen.

“What a comforting thought that must be,” Hannibal considers, “rather than that He cares nothing whatsoever for His creations.”

The man beneath him trembles, and the warlord can see how weak he is. Belly hollowed to a basin and bones risen into ridges of cruel mountains. Whipcord muscles snapped tight and shaking in desperate self-preserving energy. Blue eyes, dulled like sand-blasted bottle glass, beneath hair that’s not seen bath nor comb in a dog’s age. Ruddy lips, wind-scorched and dry, healed over in their cracks again and again, past a dense beard.

He could be lovely, were he shorn and washed, food forced into his gut.

Hannibal strokes once down his cock, thumb pressing to its stiffening length, as hard from the body that lays before him as from their raid that day. Body firing hot with adrenaline, with victory, knuckles aching from savage violence and a fresh bruise in his shoulder where his rifle misfired and kicked harder than he’d braced to take, Hannibal’s pulse gallops faster. He’d used the blasted barrel of the thing to bang their brains out against the earth instead. He doesn’t care for guns but for when the situation requires them - such as today, to crack a report and send civilization’s dregs to scattering. Then he gladly turns to the knife hilted on his belt instead.

“How were you caught?”

“Does it matter?” the man asks, a coughing laugh curling his breath short and painful. “Truly, does it matter?”

The warlord acquiesces to this, and shakes his head. “No,” he agrees. “I merely wished to know which of my men will have you next. One must make amends for their sins, whether or not you believe in God. This is the basis of any functioning society. You will find forgiveness through your own communion, the sacrifice of self to correct your wrongs. Alive, and then in death,” the warlord tells him.

“Some kind of civility,” snorts the man, turning his cheek against his arm. He watches the wall, sides heaving, cock small and soft against his hip and anger in his jaw. “Do it, then,” he says. A furious tear slips from the corner of his eye and reveals pale skin beneath the grime it licks away. “Tell yourself whatever you got to tell yourself so’n you ain’t feel a lick of guilt for enjoying it, because you know in your black fuckin’ heart you will. I don’t give a shit.”

“Language.”

“Fuck you.”

The warlord rests one knee to the bed, then the other, leaning forward slowly to set his hands on either side of the captive’s arms, bearing down over him in slow deliberate motions. He will have him. He will see the man writhe in pleasure and pain before setting him loose in the church for his men to do as they will, with a promise that should he make it to the door alive he can go.

Hannibal breathes him in, the filthy mixture of dried sweat and panic, mud and the remnants of human excrement that must have gathered in the basement. He would see him cleaned up, shaved, combed, fed. He would see him beautiful before he is destroyed.

One hand slides into the man’s hair and tugs, watching the wince of pain briefly shadow his features before he forces them to impassive coolness once more. Or he tries.

His other hand, Hannibal forces between the man’s teeth, one finger at a time until his jaw is held wide and every sound he makes has no way of being muffled. Hannibal will make him heard, will make his men listen and know and shiver in anticipation of having the same, soon. More tears slip to clean the muck on the man’s face but those blue eyes never once meet his.

He ducks his head to savor slowly the body before him, Hannibal’s own poised just above, as much to tease as to hold himself at bay. He draws lips and nose over the pale throat, pulse hammering and tendons stark. He moves lower, making a pleased sound of his own, until he reaches a small scar across the man’s skin.

This one is older than most he wears, no raised flesh to indicate bad healing, no stitch marks crawling along it like a centipede. No, this scar did not come to him in this world but in another, and Hannibal knows it. Somewhere in the fog of his mind a memory surfaces and he frowns, trying to bury it again.

“You broke your collarbone,” he says, the words snared from him as if by something otherworldly. “When your bones were still malleable and given to healing. When you were small.” Hannibal raises his eyes to the blue ones that deliberately avoid his own, until the man blinks them closed, freeing unintended tears and breathing erratic and stuttered against Hannibal’s hand. 

Hannibal takes in his features again, the wild hair and freckles just visible beneath his eyes when he pales or when the sun hits just so. The soft curves of his face even after all this time, recognizable beneath the dirty beard. He knows this face. He knows this body. Slowly, finger by finger, he releases his hold on the man’s hair and strokes it instead, watching the shudder run through him.

Hannibal’s own pulse snaps cold through his system, adrenaline and panic and realization flooding him head to toe as he looks down at his friend whom he had feared lost years and years ago.

“Do you know me, Will?” he asks him.

The name sparks sharper response than any threat or any blow. Will sucks down air like a man drowning when Hannibal’s hand slips from between his teeth, and forces his breath out again as if the mere sensation of that relief is detestable to him. He doesn’t look towards him again, facing the wall and braced just as hard as before, and though his eyes betray his recognition his words hiss like embers into ash.

“I don’t know what you are.”

“You’ve told me what I am,” Hannibal reminds him, drawing the backs of his knuckles down Will’s scruffy cheek, sallow, pale. He’s hungry and thin, he’s exhausted. Hannibal’s heart beats steady but heavier with every moment of looking at this man. “I wasn’t that to you always.”

Will arches upward, grimacing at the snare of fetters caught around wrists and ankle, his free foot pressing to the bed but not enough to turn him from Hannibal’s weight above, not enough when his other limbs are bound. His left hand curls, fingers bent softly to his palm. Hannibal sees the bones there, bird-fine but once strong, and how they move under his skin in a way they shouldn’t, caught beneath the cruelly cinched strap.

“Are you gonna do it or what?” Will demands, teeth gritted.

Hannibal blinks, for a moment so lost in his mind that he forgets why they’re here, how they’re here, pressed close as they once were but neither soft and pliant now as they were before. No longer boys, ten years between then and now, between the last time Hannibal’s lips parted in ecstasy against Will’s throat as they rubbed together.

“Only enough for them to know,” he decides after a moment, reaching to work free the strap holding Will’s arm, the one so long ago injured under cruel boots by indifferent men. As soon as he’s free, Will lashes forward to slap hard against Hannibal’s cheek, leaving a tiny scratch where his nail caught the skin. Hannibal’s jaw sets but he doesn’t otherwise respond. “Moan.”

“No.”

Hannibal hums and presses to Will again, turning his head to murmur against his ear as Will strains away from him, eyes closed and teeth bared.

“If you do not, what they will do to you will be worse. Let me claim you, in their eyes if nowhere else.” He watches Will tremble, hands curled into tight fists, head shaking just once in another denial. “Curse me, then, but do it now.”

“You were gonna give me to them anyway, weren’t you?” Will snarls, once brilliant eyes made glassy now, lips the parted wide over big teeth with easy laughter now split and savaged by time and exposure. “Just fuckin’ do it then. You don’t know me. You didn’t, and you were gonna -”

“I do. I know you.”

“Pretend like you don’t, then,” spits Will, “and do to me what you’ve done to everyone else you’ve dragged into your goddamn bed.”

Will jerks his caught ankle hard enough to shudder the bed, another time just pulls the leather tight enough to cut. He fights, as best he can with only two opposing limbs free, but Hannibal avoids the blows, takes them, it doesn’t matter until it’s clear Will isn’t listening and Hannibal sets his hand softly in warning against his throat.

“Moan,” he intones, “now.”

With a far deeper pain etched across his features, Will shakes his head but resigned, relents. He makes a sound, more animal than human. Beneath it curl the traces of heat that Will once poured adoring against Hannibal’s skin, now nothing more than an echo of a voice that has since been unalterably changed.

“Again,” Hannibal tells him, smacking his palm flat against the headboard. Will flinches and cries out low. There’s a whoop of delight from the room outside.

“I knew a boy once,” Will whispers. “He was beautiful.”

“He died,” Hannibal hisses. “He died in a bed just like this one half a decade ago.”

Will turns his head away and closes his eyes, breathing as evenly as he can, even when Hannibal continues to shift the bed as though they’re both writhing on it, as they once did together, like puppies in straw, delighting in what their young bodies could do. Will’s brows furrow and his lips twist and he sobs, a sound that carries to the door and beyond, a sound he can’t control.

“I miss him.”

Beyond the door come sounds of encouragement, of grotesque egging-on and advice for what to do to him next, suggestions of what will happen to Will once he is beyond the door. He doesn’t listen. Hannibal ducks his head to breathe against him so he doesn’t hear.

“Moan again,” Hannibal says. Will does this time, louder and harsher and crueler than before. He does it with his eyes shut and his body hardened. He does it to punish Hannibal and make him remember once how sweetly those sounds were given to him without force or threat.

“I have mourned that boy with every step I took. Not a morning I woke up and didn’t reach for him. Not a night I laid out and didn’t ache so hard I shook because I couldn’t protect him.”

“Stop,” Hannibal tells him, but in defiance and resignation both, Will moans again. He brings his fist, his unsteady wrist, back against the headboard and thunders it against the wall. This time, his cry of pain is physical, and beneath the false rhythms of Hannibal’s body that once were the only truth they ever truly knew, Will curls small as he can against himself.

“I have grieved for that boy and his honest heart,” Will finally says. “And he’s as dead to me now as he has been for a decade.”

“Shut up,” Hannibal hisses, and in answer Will moans again, louder, helpless, a sound Hannibal hoped never to hear from him again, a sound he made when curled on the cold ground as Hannibal was dragged away by the five men who shattered their lives.

A call comes from outside the door and Hannibal snarls towards it, teeth bared and eyes narrowed, bent over Will as a predator over prey, as one creature protecting another. He doesn’t tell Will that he ached for him daily, that every time he was shoved into this very bed, every time he bit the sheets between his teeth to deliberately not make a sound as he was hurt and violated and humiliated, he was grateful that Will wasn’t suffering this in his place. He doesn’t tell him because that boy is dead. That boy died a long time ago.

It was a mercy killing. A necessity. That boy would not have survived as the man now survives.

Hannibal shoves his fist hard against the wall and pants down against Will who watches him now with a disgust Hannibal has never seen directed at him from those eyes before. Then Will blinks and looks away, chin raised and chest heaving with breath. A dismissal, before Hannibal can dismiss him.

Will says nothing more. He doesn’t move. He lays still against the tangled blankets but for his sides, pulsing quick breaths, and his blood quickening in the vessels of his throat, revealed by thin skin and starvation.

“Nothing else to say,” Hannibal asks.

Will sucks in a shaking breath, and curls his hand against his chest, gaze fixed unfocused on the wall. “I told him all I needed to say long ago.”

“Will you run if I untie you?”

“Yes.”

“With them right outside the door?”

“Yes.”

“They’ll tear you to pieces.”

“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

Will snorts. “How gracious of you.” He doesn’t kick when Hannibal works free the tether on his ankle. He doesn’t struggle when his free wrist is bound again, more carefully this time. He doesn’t move at all when Hannibal folds a blanket over him to keep him warm and covered. When he leaves the room, to a few loud guffaws and cruel cheering, Will turns his head towards the opposite wall and closes his eyes.

This is not the boy he mourned, this is something twisted and broken. This is not the man Will hoped to spend his life with, tending their garden and watching the seasons add more and more strange flowers to the top of their little house by the swamp. This is not the man Will loved.

_You’re a monster._

He rests, much as he wishes he could stoically stay awake he is exhausted, and when he wakes, bladder full and stomach aching with hunger, he sees Hannibal there at the end of the bed, watching him.

“There is food.”

“I don’t want it.”

“In the other room the bath is drawn. You should shave.”

“I shan’t.”

“Then I will do it for you.”

“Why?” Will asks, voice cracking dry from so long without water, so long without use once he realized he could not bring about swift death by hollering from the cellar.

“Infestations,” Hannibal says, flat. “Hygiene.”

“So I look like the boy you used to know.”

Hannibal says nothing to this, but the flicker in his jaw speaks at least to the cruelty of Will’s assessment. That’s enough to satisfy him, and Will curls to his side again. The mattress beneath is so soft as to be unreal. When Will woke, he thought of where his father might be and it took a beat to recall how long ago he last saw him. Memories dredged up by simple comforts that in these times are anything but, for they of the old world who yet harbor recollections of what it was like before.

More wrenching yet was that this was the first time waking that Will did not seek to draw himself closer to a boy long dead. With savage finality, that memory has been released.

Hannibal moves near again, and although Will tenses and turns away, all the man does is work the bindings on his wrists free for Will to move as he wishes. The door is locked, Will doesn’t even bother to check, and he goes stoic to the other room to relieve himself. He’s as surprised as he is relieved that Hannibal does not follow him, does not crowd him in the little room. He listens to the man moving around by the bed as he sinks into the surprisingly hot water in the tub and submerges himself.

Perhaps if he stays there long enough he can drown, and slip quietly from one hell into another.

Perhaps if he stays there long enough he will meet the friend he lost and they can go together.

He does not discount the words Hannibal spoke to him, regarding his becoming. But he finds it hard to allow his empathy to envelope something to vile and rotten, that was once so far from it. No amount of sympathy towards living things can reconcile the boy that he once knew with the beast that holds him captive now. No amount of empathy can make sense of how one so profoundly gentle could become so savage.

When Will sits up again he rubs his hands over his face and down his neck, startling when Hannibal sets two bottles beside him, and a bar of soap.

“Get out,” Will says.

Hannibal makes a sound but says nothing more, and goes again. Will watches, narrow-eyed, the shifting of the warlord’s muscles made brutal with strength, the broad shoulders and narrow hips. He watches this man’s form as closely as he’s watched any animal he’s ever looked upon, but far more wary now for knowing how dangerous this one has become.

Will takes the soap and tries not to think from whence it came. It’s hand-pressed, carved out from a block. Made by local hands and local sources and Will’s empty belly heaves with remembrance of youthful lessons in what’s required to make the stuff. But the bugs on his body have gone from itching to pain. His skin is raw from so long out of shelter and then thrust into a crude facsimile of it. He washes himself and hums tuneless and low, to drown out the memories of hot bubble-baths and cold springs, focused only on stripping filth from his starved form.

Will wonders if this is preparation, in the same way he field-dressed creatures caught in swamp traps long ago.

He allows the thought to remain, for in truth it’s the only end in sight he can see for himself in this place.

The shampoo is old, its name one for which Will can distantly remember catchy jingles and commercial images of women laughing as soap bubbles spilled across their bare shoulders. He breathes its floral chemical scent in deep before shoving it with hardened fingers through shaggy hair and bulky beard. No sound comes from the chamber of the warlord, and the water blackens with dirt around Will’s sun-bronzed and skinny body.

He shampoos twice, conditions once, laughing to himself at the fact that he can finally run a hand through his hair without getting caught in it. It’s longer than he expected, far down his shoulders when heavy with water. Feminine. _Pretty_. That word still tugs his stomach to turning when he thinks of it, hears it in his nightmares before he wakes with a start, tied up high in the tree he had chosen for his sanctuary that night.

He climbs from the water only when it’s cold, wrapping the towel around himself and briskly drying off. He’s cleaner than he has been in months, and the bites against his skin look crueller with the muck now washed away that had once covered it. He is sickly. He is small. In all likelihood it hardly matters since he will soon be made a meal of. He hopes they choke on it. He hopes they get poisoned by his hate for them all.

He does not remove the towel from around his middle as he stands over the tub and regards the rest of the room. It’s well appointed, a palace compared to how everyone else lives. Hard won but at what cost?

None that would be worth it, in Will’s eyes. None that could be.

“Come here.”

“Go away,” Will sighs.

“Shave yourself, then. I will not have your lice infested in my home.”

“Then let me go.”

“No.”

Not again, Hannibal wants to say. Not ever again. Not released to the men who all but bay outside his door like famished hounds and not to the wretched world beyond the sanctuary he has won through blood and brutality.

There’s more curses, crude and nasty. More venomous words spit his way that he chooses not to hear. He lays across the bed, hands folded on his belly, and listens instead to the splashing of gathered, cleaned, and heated water, and the first scrape of a razor that’s echoed with a swear.

Will wonders if he might just cut his own throat right here and now, and choke laughing on his own blood as it spreads across the floor. Out of morbid curiosity, he checks the safety razor, its blades clean and rustless. He thinks past how it was found and instead to whether it can be taken apart.

“Continue,” comes the warlord’s low tenor, now nearly devoid of whatever accent it once held.

“Fuck you,” Will answers, waiting a moment more to see if anything further happens before he keeps on scraping his face clean of the matted beard that’s kept him warm for so long. He needn’t have it anymore, anyway. He’s not leaving this place alive, likely by their hands but just as possibly by his own.

By the time he’s finished, the razor is blunt and leaving unpleasant scrapes against his skin. Will tosses it to the sink regardless, and seeks for a pair of scissors in the small drawers. He finds some once used for trimming nails, little elegant things that will have to do. He sets them to his hair and begins the arduous process of trimming down his locks to something manageable. 

The warlord doesn’t ask about the silence, he listens to the quiet hiss of metal against hair and lets Will groom himself as he needs. He considers the men beyond the door, he considers how he will have to keep Will away, tethered for his own good, fed alone, housed alone, secured by Hannibal’s claim.

He will have to claim him again, falsely, but enough for his men to know not to go near.

It will be arduous.

It will be a constant reaffirmation to sex-starved and half-rabid men that Will is not theirs to touch, that he is not theirs to fuck, that he is not theirs to even look upon under threat of death.

It will require display of what happens when one does.

Will cuts loose the matted strands and tangles. He cuts away the sideburns that he did not reach with the razor. Stroke by stroke, snip by snip, he reveals to himself a boy he thought just as far gone as the one he lost so long ago. What’s more, he reveals the haggard man he’s become once the trappings of survival are cut away.

Black circles droop beneath his eyes. Every bug bite and burn and scar stands stark across skin once smooth and freckled and kissed by sun and lips alike. His mouth is chapped raw, broken in scarlet streaks where he sucked blood and dust clean before the splits sealed again. The bones of his shoulders and chest shadow stark against tanned skin as he regards himself in the mirror, with lethal muscles stripped to their bare necessity of existence under weather-coarsened skin and welts of scar tissue.

He is no more the boy he used to be than the man in the room awaiting him.

Both boys died on the day that their little paradise was destroyed.

Around his wrist, Will still wears a final remnant of what existed then in now-unfathomable bliss. A strand of darkened, smooth-worn cordage woven by their hands from stripped fibers of milkweed. They scattered black and orange monarchs from its leaves to cut it from its moorings. The butterflies followed them as they sat and laughed and their fingers brushed and drew their lips together in turn.

Will holds the scissors to the strand of rope. Their first attempt, too short to be of any use. It was slid inside the emptied and washed Coke bottle from the station that brought about their harrowing. Will slipped one night, in torrential monsoon rains, and the bottle smashed. Most of the pieces of what was within washed away but he grabbed this.

Only this.

The last remnants of a life once lived and one far greater, only imagined.

He shakes as he holds the sharp scissors to it. His lip curls and his nose wrinkles and he quakes and he drops the scissors into the sink with a clatter.

“Are you alright?”

Will doesn’t answer, not even with a swear. The rope remains around his wrist and gathering the towel around his waist, he leaves the bathroom without a word. He doesn’t look at the man sprawled with hands fisted and an arm over his eyes. Clad in glistening fire-blackened leather and bindings of cloth and hide and smears of greasepaint, Will sees him only as a shadow.

“Where are you going?”

Will doesn’t answer this time, either.

He flings the door to the warlord’s chambers open and stands bare and beaten and beautiful in all the glittering eyes that snap to him. The snarl behind him sounds like a coyote, relentless. The growls before him are as wolves, ravenous.

Will walks towards them, because it doesn’t matter now.

A lamb to the sacrifice he deserves, to purify his own failures.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I wonder what the boy I loved would’ve thought of the likes of you,” Will whispers._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

The first man to approach just happens to be closest to the door. He is hardly ranked so high on the pecking order, but for the few seconds he gets alone in proximity with this beautiful, clean, untouched thing, he looks at Will like he’s nothing more than meat that stands on its own.

He sets a thumb against Will’s lips and when they part he hooks it against his teeth to drag Will closer, down to his knees, where Will goes without protest. He can taste sweat and filth and ash against that hand, he can see nothing in the man’s eyes but hot angry lust, and for a moment everything goes very quiet. He folds his lips over the man’s thumb and sucks.

And then the sound comes back. And then the motion. The hand is ripped from his mouth so quickly that his teeth catch against the skin, and then another replaces it. Someone shoves hard against Will’s back, another hand rips away the towel from around his waist. He is touched everywhere, with seeking hands and cruel fingers and reeking breath too close to him. Will closes his eyes and imagines that soon enough it will all be over, their hunger so hot it will burn him to shreds before they can even touch him.

He only hears, and tastes, and feels. He does not see. He holds his breath so he does not smell. Nails rake down his body, he is arched and bent one way then the other, over and over until he aches, by different hands, against different mouths, skin pressing to the bulge of one cock or another behind leather pants and heavy rough canvas. He makes a sound, he’s fairly sure, something weak, and goes entirely pliant, not even holding himself up.

Someone grasps his cock, another slips a hand between the cheeks of his ass, and suddenly Will panics. This isn’t as quick as he wanted the fire to be. He is not as indifferent as he hoped he could be. He is scared. He is disgusted. He’s going to be torn apart and he is helpless.

He makes another sound, seeks with his hands to stop those that spread and touch and pinch him and hears only laughter in response. He tenses and squirms and curls, and when he finally opens his eyes he sees a mess of limbs and grinning faces, filthy pants and dangling leathers. He can’t breathe in the swarm around him and Will presses his eyes closed again in his fear. He knows he’s crying. He knows he won’t stop, even when this stops. He wonders how long tears can flow once the heart stops beating.

Then one by one the offending hands peel from him. Some leave marks against his back, some leave bruises between his legs, others squeeze his throat until they are forced from it and Will chokes on air once more. One by one he is left naked and shaking and dirty again, until strong arms gather him close and lift him, and barked orders that sound as though they’re yelled through water pass over his head to the wolves beyond.

There’s blood. He can smell it, ripe and metallic. He knows it’s his own by the trail that slicks hot down his legs. Part of Will hopes he’s been injured only slightly, so he’ll grow decayed and infected in spite of the warlord who calls this rabble family. Part of him hopes the penetration was as sharp and stabbing as it felt, and that he’s only moments away from an endless sleep where he’ll perhaps find that little shack in the swamp again.

There’s tears, too. Choking savage ripped raw from inside him. Tears of anger and spite and hate for the man who drags him back from the wolves and slams his door. Tears of dismay and agony for a death prolonged more than it should be. He should have died that day too, in body and not only in heart.

He doesn’t deserve this, for better or for worse.

He’s never harmed a soul that’s had even a shred left of humanity worth saving.

His palms find stiff leather as Will shoves himself away from whispers that sound so much like hissing snakes. Scrabbling across the floor he’s grabbed again and goes limp. Will stops fighting. He cannot stop his tears, his hitched breath and the agonized wails that carry on it. He cannot stop his heart, try as he might, when rough fingers stroke softly through his hair and then snare taut.

There is no harsh cruelty in the pull, there is no dragging him across the floor or striking him for his disobedience. No, the man holds Will as Hannibal did during the rougher storms their little house weathered, he holds Will as Hannibal did when he woke from a nightmare and tried to swallow air like a man drowning. This is protection, this is not cruelty, and it hurts the more for it.

“Stupid, stubborn boy, why?” Hannibal hisses, curling on the floor and dragging Will into his lap, holding him close. “Why?”

“Because he’s gone,” Will sobs, drawing his legs up and burying his tears against his arm. “He’s gone, the boy I was living for is _gone_ , so what’s the point?”

Every day, every goddamn moment of every day for ten goddamn winters, Will lived for him. He hunted only from bare necessity. He killed only to help himself or those others he met along the way. Every decision he made was with that boy in mind. What would that boy think when Will found him again? Would he look on Will’s survival with pride or dismay?

Will lived - and lived in such a way - to do right by him. He did not wither or corrupt. And he hoped, against all reason, that he would find him some day and they would mash their mouths together and laugh again.

“They’d have killed you,” Hannibal tells him.

“Good.”

“They’d have split you in half and let you bleed out.”

“Good.”

He thinks of the boy who fell sick one winter, shaking and feverish and pushing up any food they could find to feed him. He thinks of that boy and his demands to be left outside to die, so he wouldn’t infect Hannibal, so he wouldn’t waste their food and warmth and space. He thinks of Will’s selflessness then and his selfishness now and he holds Will tighter.

Hannibal is not the boy Will remembers.

He is a disappointment in the man he has become.

Hannibal holds him closer and buries his nose in the fragrant warm curls, easing his grip only when Will struggles against it.

“I will tend your cuts.”

“Don’t.”

“You have agency over your actions, you do not have agency over mine. If I have to heal you by force, I will.”

“You don’t have any other way, do you? By force alone,” Will asks, breath shaking as his body does. “You don’t ask, you command. You don’t listen, you tell.”

“Gentle things do not survive in this world, Will,” Hannibal tells him, but it’s hardly malicious, it’s hardly cruel. For a moment, just a moment, he sounds like the boy Will had lost by the swamp. Uneasy blue eyes search between Hannibal’s own, but seem not to find for what they seek. Dry throat clicking raw, Will turns his gaze away again.

“And orchids never flower again once they’re moved,” he says.

“They spread their roots and grow strong. The flowers hardly matter.”

“No different than a weed then. Stealing resources and space, sunlight and sustenance. Growing and taking from other plants and providing nothing. Let me go.”

“No,” Hannibal says.

“If you didn’t recognize me, and you nearly goddamn didn’t, you’d have done what?” Will asks, endeavoring to draw himself away from arms that feel too warm around him, too strong, too distantly familiar to provide any but a chilling ghostly comfort.

“I’d have done just as I did,” Hannibal replies. “I would have made it clear that you were no one else’s to touch. That you were no one else’s to hurt. I would have put on a show behind a closed door and then let you go.”

“Bullshit.”

“I do not let them harm children. I do not let them harm women.” Hannibal says, holding Will firm even as he squirms against him. “I do not keep them here, they are freed immediately upon capture to find their own way.”

“Their own way?” Will spits. “In a wilderness where men die daily you send out women and children. Merciful monster you are.”

“There is a tribe to the north,” Hannibal patiently explains. “A clan of women that men tremble to even consider. Believe me, they could not be in safer hands when they leave mine.”

“And those who don’t,” Will says - he doesn’t ask. It’s a statement, knowing the answer from little more than the bare narrowing of Hannibal’s gaze. “The men you keep. I ain’t a woman. I’m not a child. You weren’t playing a goddamn game with me. Had you not noticed, had I continued to hold my tongue…”

“You walked into what would have awaited you,” Hannibal says. “You threw yourselves to them as anyone who harms my men -”

“Your men,” laughs Will, held uncomfortably tight when he tries to shove away again.

“As anyone who does harm to us could rightfully expect to receive as retribution.”

Will swallows down a raw sound. His tongue tastes of dirt, his lips filthied by rough fingers and flicking tongues and worse still shoved into his mouth in the few moments in which he was subsumed. There is blood, in a place where it should not be, where probing hands groped him wide. His gorge rises sharp and sudden and but for an empty heave, nothing comes up but bile that he chokes back down.

He shuts away for good the memories of shared French patois and clumsy French kisses. He locks up and immolates the sanctuary that existed only in his mind for so long. Those memories and more now harden like iron blades, cruelly sharp.

He will wield them like the weapons they are until Hannibal has no choice but to stop the assault.

“I wonder what the boy I loved would’ve thought of the likes of you,” Will whispers.

Hannibal swallows and lifts his eyes to the high stone ceiling. “He would have feared me,” he replies. “He would have detested me. And he would have given me anything I asked for in order to keep you safe.”

There is no malice in his tone here either, and reluctantly, Hannibal lets Will go as he stands to check the door is locked and secure it with another latch before pocketing the key. Then he makes his way to the bathroom once more, filling a bowl with water from the barrel that stands in the corner of the room before he returns.

He kneels before Will with a soft cloth and the water bowl and lifts his eyes to him. “Let me clean you.”

Will’s attention snaps to the door, to the lock held fast and just as much to the volley of unpleasantries hurtled at Will through dense wooden slats. He flinches too at the hand against his cheek, jerking his head away from the warlord’s grasp and gritting his teeth together.

His strength is faltering. He can do little more than snarl and snap. It’s been longer than he can remember since eating anything, refusing the scraps hurtled down to them in the cellar. Nearly two days since he last drank water, beyond furtive sips stolen from the hot bath before he got in and a little more when forced to shave his face.

Had the warlord not pulled him from the mob, he could not have fought them.

If the warlord wanted to take him now, there would be scarcely more than weak scratches and failing fists to overcome to pin him down.

Will presses his fingers against his eyes and digs them there until he sees sparks. He’s only aware of his trembling when Hannibal’s hand squeezes a cool cloth against his chest. He’s only aware of hot tears welling beneath his fingers when they spill salt against his lips.

Will doesn’t fight what the warlord wants. He can’t.

And even if he could, for what is there left to fight?

Will sucks his bottom lip into his mouth as the cloth moves gently over his chest, against his nipples - sensitive from being tugged and pinched - and down to his stomach. He tenses when the cloth seeks lower still but Hannibal removes it to wet it again, and when it returns it is to clean the scratches on his back.

None of the marks are dangerous, just the first layer of skin scraped and pierced by rough nails and cruel tugs. Hannibal lets the cool water run down Will’s back and pool on the floor. He takes his time to make sure every scratch is cleaned, until the water runs clear from them. He will dress them as best he can and hope Will doesn’t claw the soft cloth from himself out of spite.

From his back, Hannibal moves to his face, tilting Will’s chin with gentle knuckles beneath it. He cleans the blood under his nose. He wets the cloth and lets Will suck water from it as he dabs at his chapped lips. He washes over hot eyelids and sweating brow. He cleans almost playfully behind his ears.

Then he soaks the cloth and folds it to a clean side and takes Will’s hand to set the thing into his palm. He doesn’t touch Will beyond that, but he doesn’t move away.

“Do you want water?” he asks.

Will nods before he can stop himself, snared by primal survival drive for this most basic necessity. He sucks his bottom lip between his teeth, licking the lingering water from it, and watches the warlord stand. Unfurling slow and strangely tired, Will takes note of the glimpses of scars he can see on skin once so smooth he teased him for his tenderness.

They would get more together, they said once. Learn the old ones and all the new ones built up like memories of their lives built up from scratch.

When Hannibal turns to go, Will daubs the water once more into the bucket and slicks it between his legs. He hisses between his teeth as the contact against his bottom stings sensitive. As pain so often provides, there is a clarity in this fresh discomfort. If it hurts so much now, he can scarcely fathom how it would have felt had the wolves taken him apart into pieces.

When Hannibal returns, it is with a heavy cup filled to the brim with water. He passes it to Will and takes the cloth from him to rinse in the bathroom. They move around each other like phantoms, quiet and cautious that the other will disappear or hurt them should they move too suddenly to break the silence.

“Will you eat?” Hannibal asks from the bathroom, and Will shakes his head. The warlord doesn’t coax him, he says nothing more. When he returns he takes from Will the cup he had given him and offers another.

Will holds it in his hands, bare still, and mindless of the fact he is. There’s no reason to cover himself. Hell, there’s nothing worth covering. Burdened by exhaustion and far starker sorrows than that, it’s a wonder his heart finds strength to struggle out its beating at all. He’s got little concern that his body will respond to this man the way it did once towards the boy who fades as if a thing imagined in his thoughts.

He sips slowly this time, his hollowed belly already roiling from the unfamiliarity of this weight. Before him at distance stands the warlord watching. Will runs a hand through his short-shorn hair, messy and uneven, surveying the man in furtive glances. Here is one who has not in years felt hunger. Here is one whose body has been given time and sustenance to grow strong. As once Will helped grow a life rather than simply maintain it, Hannibal has progressed beyond most that simply strain to survive each day in turn.

He is strong, wide-chested and flat-stomached, rippling power in muscles seemingly carved hard as fire-tempered wood. Ashen-wood hair glistens sleek above dark eyes lined in ruthless wrinkles gouged deep. Will can see writ his cruelty in the shadows that have aged him just as clearly as he can see that Hannibal’s malice towards him is deeply-planted and stunted strangely in its growth.

He looks away from that black and ichorous place, a poisonous garden fed venom by hands unknown to Will that he’d have given his life to stop from doing so.

“I won’t eat your food,” Will says again, pressing a hand to the floor as if to stand and then considering better of the endeavor when the room spins and his body inflames in aching. He settles again, drawing his legs close to himself, pulsed through by shivers as water dries against his skin. “You’ll see me fuckin’ starve first.”

“I will endeavor to see no such thing,” is all the warlord says before he passes Will to get his large coat and move towards the door. He works free the locks that can be adjusted manually, unlocks the one that requires his key and leaves, closing and locking it behind himself again and leaving Will alone.

Beyond the door he can hear the man give his commands. Whatever they are, they aren’t met with cheers and pleasure. He doesn’t have to raise his voice for Will to feel the power he carries among his men. Whether they like his decisions or not they don’t contest them, and as Hannibal’s voice carries further and further from the door, and footsteps follow, Will finds himself swaying with exhaustion.

He finishes his cup of water and sets it aside. The bed is near enough that all he need do is crawl on it but he refuses, tugging, instead, the top blanket from it to curl up on the floor within. He can hear whispers beyond the door as his eyes close, and he pays them no mind as he falls to rest.

“Again, Kincaid, and you will find yourself in his position,” Hannibal repeats, shouldering his coat and attaching the keys to his belt. “Not a word, not a movement towards him without express permission.”

“‘raps if he gets mouthy,” the man suggests, and others laugh around him. Hannibal merely smiles.

“Perhaps,” is all he says.

There is unease as Hannibal passes through the space and towards the steps outside, but there always seems to be. When the men are given leave to use dangerous captives as they like, they complain about the rations being smaller than usual. When they’re amply fed and lazy, they complain for lack of company. They seem never to draw the obvious parallel that the existence of one limits the other, and Hannibal’s attempts to convey this prioritization to them have amounted to one of his deputies barking at them to shut up and go find what they want if they’re so hard up for it.

Hardly the subtlety Hannibal hopes might impress upon them the circumstances of their own consternation, but it seems to do the trick.

“Sure is pretty that one,” considers one of the smarter men, though he’s hardly beyond being called a boy. “Everyone got real riled up when you took him back.”

“I never gave him to you,” Hannibal impresses on them again.

A stupid question is cut short by Kincaid’s elbow lodging against the kid’s gut. “Just tell ‘em to leave that one alone.”

“There will be more,” Hannibal says. “There always are.”

“Are we going north yet?”

“No. The encampment to the east,” suggests the warlord.

“We’ve already stripped it,” Kincaid says.

“And yet there are fires alight there, so clearly someone has decided to occupy the space again before we’ve finished gathering the fuel from beneath. We’ve an understanding not to go north -”

This time, the boy’s breath is allowed to give birth to words, meriting a wary look from Kincaid. “Some of the men -”

Hannibal arches a brow, his booted feet settled to the curved marble.

“They went,” the boy says, folding his arms.

“North,” Hannibal confirms. Both his deputies nod, and Hannibal curls his lips together. The riflemen are in their stations, laughing loudly with guns at rest. There’s little need to stay alert so far from the cities, and with their territory established upon an undercurrent of whispered terror among nearby settlements.

“That boy,” Kincaid tells him. “The little blonde one you let run off, what tore out the throat of Daughtery. After him, they went, once you was gone.”

Hannibal considers the direction, narrowing his eyes towards it and chewing the inside of his lip. He dislikes little more than having his instructions deliberately ignored. Rarely is there a time when someone disobeys that they are not made a public disgrace of. They are incapacitated from making stupid mistakes again, and his men get feasts and company for a night or two.

“Go east,” he suggests to two of the men following him. Hangers-on, eager to distinguish themselves by currying their warlord’s favor. “Return by nightfall, report if you cannot attack, attack if you feel you can take them. Upon your heads it will be should your judgment call be incorrect. You,” he points to Kincaid and the younger boy. “North.”

He goes with them.

The terrain here is hardly the dangerous swampland where he and Will made their home, nor is it the well-kept gardens of the gated community in which he grew up. Here is a mess of streets and overgrown shrubbery. Mud and muck have made it on the roads only when their trucks have smeared it against them, or when the rains fell torrential and the earth moved on its own accord. They take the journey at a lope, easy and comfortable, Hannibal armed with his knife, rifle hung over his shoulder, the other two with their handguns, Kincaid with a sharpened screwdriver and the boy with a bludgeon.

None that remain in their compound are brave or smart enough to attempt to seek out Will. None are foolish enough not to imagine the hell that would rain down on them if they tried. And so the thought of him becomes a distraction, and in that, an irritation. Persistent as the black flies in summer that bite any skin not smeared orange with ground marigolds, Hannibal finds his steady strides interspersed with penetrating thoughts of what he’s doing. Whether he’ll eat. Whether he’ll try to flee while Hannibal is stalking northward.

Every time he forces the thought of him aside, it returns in a new form.

“It was a while ago they left,” the boy - Blanchard, Hannibal recalls now - tells him after a time.

“And no one sought to stop them?”

“We didn’t know until we heard it from someone else, and by then you were…”

“Occupied,” Kincaid says, not without a black-toothed grin.

Blanchard nods, as Hannibal hardens his brow. “Didn’t seem right to interrupt.”

No one gives excuse or explanation beyond that. Hannibal offers neither chastisement nor directive. It’s a fool’s errand, unless the boy hid well. Even with his lead, to outrun one of the raiders would be at best unlikely. Hannibal hopes they had their fill of him, in all the forms it undoubtedly took, and that it was worth the cost.

“Bring them back alive,” he finally says. “An example needs be made, it seems.”

Blanchard whoops and turns on the spot as he runs. “Will you flay ‘em?”

“I’ve been told my men are lacking in company,” Hannibal says instead, to a grin and low laugh from Kincaid at his side.

The further north they go, the more wary Hannibal gets. He has explored the territory around his church in every direction, set up traps and markers, warnings. As plentiful as land and living space is now, the stakes to own it and keep it become harder and higher. Hannibal’s raiders lay claim only to the lands west and south of their church, and several acres around the building itself. Anywhere they send their parties is theirs if won, but they rarely settle outside their radius. They hunt, they pillage, they take what they want and they return to the safety of their territory.

Hannibal had not lied to Will regarding a clan to the north. They keep a reluctant and tenuous truce with Hannibal’s people; the raiders leave them alone, and the women claim anyone who passes through to their border, uncontested. Neither side is friendly to the other. Indeed, Hannibal’s men distinctly but quietly resent the inviolate stricture that women and children go free. The women up north hold reasonable ill-regard towards the practices of the Church, as they call it, and moreso to the firepower they’ve amassed.

Once people realized they couldn’t eat bullets and fled the contested south for alleged peace in the northern states, ammunition became easy to find. Hannibal’s men simply happened to find it first, though they hardly rely on anything so noisy and finite. Blades work better. Pipes don’t need to be reloaded.

But there’s something to be said for the element of surprise.

A flare bursts brilliant before them, gouting scarlet sparks into the indigo sky. Hannibal’s swift to spin his rifle to attention, but just as quick to hold a hand upward. Only an instant’s pause, but risky enough that his mistake might see all three of them leveled if his calculations of whence it came are incorrect. Only an instant of hissing spitting smoking quiet to know that he was not wrong, and they can no more be seen in the sudden supernova light than those who pitched it. He skirts forward and kicks the blinding thing aside, gun upraised as practiced steps bear him forward.

“Easy, warlord,” comes a woman’s voice from before them. Kincaid snaps a curse and Blanchard wisely keeps his fool mouth shut. Hannibal’s muscles curled to tension hold his gun upraised a moment more, until he can force them to loosen and let it slip to his side. “Come a little far from the Church, ain’t ya?”

“A little bit,” he agrees, by way of apology. They are outfitted much as Hannibal and his men, in fortified leather over old cloth, and though he counts three on the rise ahead, he does not doubt that there are more with sights trained and fingers laid against triggers. “And you’re a little far south,” he adds, with something like amusement.

Hannibal wonders what will happen to Will if they decide to make their move now.

He swats the thought away and keeps his hands steady at his sides.

“Figured the weather would turn to shit when we brought a boy into our village this afternoon,” one of the women says, stepping forward as Hannibal does, though she still keeps her own weapon in her hands, wary. He hardly blames her. “Turns out I got a nose for these things.”

“Pity,” Hannibal murmurs, but the quirk of his lips is enough to narrow the woman’s eyes and have her tilt her head in a semblance of a nod. Her hair is cropped short, light as Hannibal’s own, yet unlike his, contrasting starkly with her dark skin. She cocks her hip and raises an eyebrow.

“What do you want, warlord?” she asks.

“Does precious time cost precious money, love?” Kincaid mutters, and Hannibal’s jaw sets. The woman seems entirely unfazed, and gazes past Hannibal to the man with a smile that’s almost sweet.

“Sure, sugar, come a little closer and we’ll negotiate the terms.”

“Aberash,” Hannibal sighs, and the forager’s clever eyes flick to his again.

“We ain’t got room for your trash, Hannibal,” she replies. “Take it home or be on your way empty-handed, but go. Your presence ain’t required nor desired here.”

Hannibal inclines his head and swallows. “Did the boy have company?” he asks.

Aberash stares him down damn near unblinking, the women at her side unswayed by the stiff silence. It would not be a whole truth were Hannibal to say he is not afraid of them. Though they outnumber, most of their camp is far from combat-ready. They lack the armament and munitions. Their sympathy to the sisters in their care - from the very old to the very young - are a weakness. But they are far more ruthless towards those outside their own than Hannibal cares to consider, and the line between fear and respect on which Hannibal stands is precariously thin.

“We might’ve found something of yours,” she finally says, eyes narrowing. “Might’ve found a few somethings.”

“Where are they?” The snap of his tone lifts her brow, and raises their shotguns a little higher. Hannibal lifts a hand in deference, and behind him, Blanchard snorts, bristling ignorant and youthful over the presumed affront of apology.

“The boy,” Aberash asks.

“Keep him. He’s bright and broad-shouldered.”

“He’s older than we allow.”

“Then send him back with me.”

This twists Aberash’s lips, parched pale, into a frown. She glances to the woman at her right, all cropped black hair and copper skin. A shrug is offered. She shares a look with the woman to her left, thick braids stuck through with bits of cloth from those she’s slain. She too, shrugs, and leans close to Aberash to whisper. After a moment, Aberash snaps her fingers and Hannibal’s attention returns to her.

“We’ll just fix him if he starts to get any ideas,” she grins, big teeth flashing brightly white. Kincaid spits thick against the soil and mutters a curse against his hand. “But you’d do right to keep your garbage on your own territory and not let it drift up this way again. Bring the warlord his runaway pups,” she says.

As Hannibal suspected, they are not alone - it would be foolish for them not to run in thicker bands than those in his keeping need to maintain. The shadows move around them, snarling curses hissed from the darkness, the scrape of heavy weight against the earth dragging dust upward in a dense plume. Hannibal recognizes the two men pulled to rest at his feet, their hands held behind their backs with plastic cordage seeping blood into white nylon, their legs bound around their thighs and knees.

“Stupid cunts,” one of them snarls.

“You don’t go for clever ones, do ya?” Aberash sighs, giving the men at her feet a look of disdain. “Puppies need training, Hannibal.”

“Or neutering,” another woman adds to a grin from their leader. Hannibal says nothing regarding his plans. He watches the women as they watch him, and then he spreads his fingers and Kincaid and Blanchard step forward to release the men’s legs so they can walk.

Hannibal keeps his eyes on Aberash and after a moment slowly inclines his head before turning on his heel to go.

The women watch them for a long time until they're out of sight, until the night around them is stifling and the two men stumble before the party of three, hands still bound behind them. There is little said - passing conversation between Kincaid and Blanchard as the older continues to teach the younger, and an occasional uneasy oath sworn by the men being brought back now as captives. They don’t argue their fate, wholly aware of the offense they’ve committed.

Hannibal does not remind them of the punishments that await. They knew from the moment they chose to step foot outside the Church.

It’s blackest night by the time they see the fires of their settlement, a series of giddy coyote-like yaps exchanged between Kincaid and the men on watch to signal their arrival as acquaintance, rather than trespasser. But the steps of the two men found in violation of Hannibal’s orders begin to falter, the threads of their fates snapping before their eyes.

“It’s bullshit,” one of them exclaims suddenly, the other two stopping when he does. Kincaid and Blanchard glance back but carry on. Hannibal stops to regard the men whose eyes are flashing wild white in their mortal terror. “That weren’t no kid you let go. You’re gettin’ fuckin’ soft and everyone knows it.”

“All the more reason, then, for this lesson,” Hannibal suggests, eyes accustomed to the dark, keenly watching the men shift one foot to the other. There is little love between his men but there is loyalty. There is a prestige with running alongside the cannibal that leads them, and they know it. Most keep in line in hopes of finding a place in Hannibal’s inner circle, others enjoy the spoils of raids.

Regular meals. Real meat. A place to stay. A body to fuck. It's hardly a bad life for the price of obedience.

“Move,” Hannibal tells them.

"I'd rather die than abide a man who takes his orders from bitches like them," spits the most forward, and the most fearful.

Hannibal regards him, expressionless - in fact emotionless entirely - for a moment more before tilting his chin to signal to those who come barreling down the church steps.

"Then we're in agreement," Hannibal notes, as howling spite, the men are dragged back by their erstwhile companions. It will be deafening tonight. The clamor will echo from church rafters and intoxicate the raiders to far greater wildness than any fermented wine they concoct. Their voices - those of the newly victorious in their claiming, and those of the traitors - will carry across open plains on stiff straight-line winds and ghost across the ears of far-flung others as warning.

Hannibal shoulders his rifle and follows, stiffening his shoulders and clearing the dust from his throat so that it resonates.

By the time he walks to the stairs and scales them, there is already a howling joy among his men, already an anticipation of bloodlust and the thrill of outliving another. Hannibal understands it well enough, and the smile that comes to his lips is hardly false. But when he tempers it, when he shuts the massive doors with his hands and leans back against them, the hall goes quiet.

“I ask little of those who follow me,” Hannibal says, voice echoing in the cavernous space and reverent silence. “I ask obedience. I ask loyalty. I ask trust.” He steps forward, close enough to the two men he had brought back that they have no choice but to look at him. “I do not ask for your dignity. I do not ask for your pride. I give my own on your behalf, when they need be given. And when you disobey, when you go on your own to places I have not scouted, places I know will do us harm and bring us no spoils,” he shrugs, turning on the spot and allowing his teeth to show in a snarl. “Then you _shit_ on my pride and my dignity. You _shit_ on the life we have built together as _brothers_. You harm the many, with your ignorant actions, and that is not a thing I will tolerate.”

Another cheer goes up, some men stamping the wooden floor in their excitement, others beating knives against the stone walls until they clang and clamor. The two men stand before Hannibal still bound and terrified, their eyes wide and lips trembling. When he looks to them again, one falls to his knees and Hannibal steps near enough to lower himself into a crouch before him.

“Penance is paid in what you have lost us with your fool’s errand,” Hannibal says gently. “Penance is paid in meat and blood, in sex and tears, and you will pay it.” He lets his eyes slip between the man’s, in quick flicks, memorizing his face and his fear and his hatred buried deeper still. And then he stands.

“Take what you’re owed,” he tells his men, and steps around the two captives as his entire clan falls upon them in their hunger.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Everything aches and not least of all Will's shame. He stands straddling a chasm of calamitous depths, fingers shoved to his eyes to at least push away the sight of it. On one side, the forgiveness he wants to grant but towards acts of violence unconscionable. On the other, righteous revulsion towards those demonic deeds and the loss of the only friend Will's ever had._
> 
> _He straightens his spine and stiffens his jaw, releasing it suddenly with another fluttering, failing laugh. "You're a stubborn shit," he mutters._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

_Will you eat?_

_No._

So it goes for days more, Will’s long-empty belly shrivelled within himself so small he’s stopped desiring the concept of sustenance altogether. Water fills in the spaces between his bones, now so stark against his skin that once in a while Will takes to trying to count them all. He always loses track when it comes to his hands, this fruitless endeavor hardly helped by the way his wrist healed imprecisely so long ago.

The howling laughing yammering hordes in the chapel outside his prison keep him from easy sleep. He need not know after what prey they bay to imagine the horrors, the rape, the dismemberment and cannibalism. He cannot help but see it starkly behind his eyes, those few fellows with whom he spoke in the cellar torn to shreds again and again whenever he tries to rest.

He does not let himself forget that it is the warlord who enables this. It is the warlord who encourages it. It is the warlord who would have given Will over to the same fate and thought not twice about doing so if not for the meeting that lead to their misery, in strange circumstances long ago.

His grieving changes, though mourning is as much a part of him as breathing now. Will aches as often for the boy’s memory as for the boy himself. It becomes more difficult, day by day, to recall how his skin bronzed and his hair gleamed bright and healthy. It becomes a trial requiring more concentration than Will has strength to muster in order to remember how they kissed around their fingers and vined their blossoming bodies together. Words whisper back at him, curling smoke-like from stone walls.

_He died in a bed just like this one half a decade ago._

Will needn’t have seen that, either, for his mind to move to unwelcome imaginings that pull his faltering form to shaking. He smears his hand across his face and turns to his back to not let the tears spill over. Laid on the floor that’s become his bed, he’s clad never in anything more than the blankets he’s been allowed to keep.

The warlord doesn’t bother him on the ground. He doesn’t touch him. Once in a while he reminds Will that the bed is his to sleep in, and Will deliberately turns his back to it. Water is plentiful and always clean to drink, and Will is encouraged - some days forced - to wash and groom himself daily.

Hannibal does not take his meals in his bedroom, but Will imagines the spill of human flesh from his lips, white tendons snapping against his chin and skin stretched between his teeth. He imagines the blood drying reeking against his throat. It sickens him. He tries not to think of the innocent questions of the boy he had loved, asking how people can be so cruel, why they would be. When that boy died, he birthed a monster, this creature of his nightmares in his place.

Will loses count of the days he lays there, hungry and weak and slowly dying. But he knows it’s morning when Hannibal crouches beside him and runs a hand through his hair. He knows it’s morning because the church is quiet and the birds - few as they are - greeted the dawn just hours before.

“You will eat,” the warlord tells him, and Will parts his parched lips before simply shaking his head no. “Come with me.”

“Can’t move,” Will points out, and a sound escapes his throat that would be a laugh if he had any strength behind it. He hardly protests when Hannibal leans in to gather him close, blanket still wrapped around him like some sick shroud. He can hardly do more than hang limp as he’s carried out the door and across the pulpit and to the side entrance of the building.

The sun is too bright and Will closes his eyes, and turning into the strong chest of the man that holds him, he can almost imagine that he’s back home in his little house by the swamp, nuzzling against Hannibal during cool spring mornings. Too tired to fight, or to let disgust snare his body taut with revulsion, he makes himself small. It isn't hard, considering how much Hannibal has grown and how weak Will's become, fed only on cold water and scalding spite. It isn't hard to let his cheek turn and his nose press to soft cloth, breathing in the scent of this man that is not one of rot or decay, but more familiar to Will than any other in the world.

The sun spills molten across his skin and Will groans from the warmth as it pierces through his blanket. Hannibal hushes him, as Will once hushed him too, when he accidentally loosed a hare caught in their traps and when he mourned for his family, lost. So few times did Hannibal ever show cracks, Will thought him impenetrable.

It cools his insides like a sudden frost to imagine what it took to make him break.

"Can you stand?" Hannibal asks, when they find themselves alone. Will squints against the light and nods, hand across his eyes and body trembling as he's gently let down to his feet. The warlord’s hand against the small of his back steadies him. Will sucks down muggy air the same way he did water when offered. Pungent with the scent of rich earth freshly turned, Will lets it fill him, and just as much the perfume of rampant blossoms that come into his view from a blur, narrowing to speckles of color spread wide.

It takes him a moment to realize he isn’t dreaming, that he is standing amidst plants and flowers, breathing in air that doesn’t smell of bodies and death. Will blinks his eyes faster as he tries to adjust to the light, and holds his breath as though to keep the fresh, living scent inside himself for longer.

He’s in a garden.

Partitions and irrigation, crops separated by season and application, tubers and fruits, flowering plants and medicinal herbs. The garden is flourishing, well-cared for and attended. A little path passes through the middle of it and smaller ones lead off to the sides, just enough space to stand and water, to fill up the ponds in which the swamp plants dwell in the months when rain is sparse. Will blinks, confused and delighted at once, and realizes, moment by moment, that the garden is planned to the grid he had once drawn in the soft mud near their little swamp home.

Hannibal built their garden, after all.

"Son of a bitch," Will breathes, fingers pressed across his mouth.

A sigh shudders from him nearly like a laugh, brow creased deep and body unsteady slightly as he takes it in. There are the dogwoods and the milkweeds, brought nearer but trained within their own spaces to stop from spreading. There are the persimmons fat and heavy, shading black glistening berries on the bushes beneath. Will knows without needing to see that there will be sassafras and wild lettuce, plants for eating and those for healing, mushrooms hidden safely in dark damp spaces, vines sprawling up the side of the church beside him.

Hannibal holds Will securely as he sways.

"You really did it," he whispers.

"I promised I would," Hannibal reminds him. "Even if I never did imagine you'd get to see it."

Everything aches and not least of all Will's shame. He stands straddling a chasm of calamitous depths, fingers shoved to his eyes to at least push away the sight of it. On one side, the forgiveness he wants to grant but towards acts of violence unconscionable. On the other, righteous revulsion towards those demonic deeds and the loss of the only friend Will's ever had.

He straightens his spine and stiffens his jaw, releasing it suddenly with another fluttering, failing laugh. "You're a stubborn shit," he mutters.

Hannibal makes a sound not unfamiliar to a laugh, keeping Will steady but not touching him further, though his fingers tremble as though they want to do just that before he gently squeezes Will’s shoulder to stay them.

“Will you eat?” he asks again, softer. The implication, the offer, the power of it is enough to have Will’s breath hitch again and he nods. Things grown in the earth, things taken only as needed, that is how Will lives, how he has lived his entire life. He nods again and Hannibal squeezes his shoulder once more.

“No one comes here but me,” he says. “No one cares for where the food comes from as long as it comes. That door is the only access and I have the only key. It’s protected, it’s safe.” Hannibal casts his eyes to the wall that is easily scaled but that never has been. His men have no interest in farming, in agriculture or horticulture. They have no interest in anything but the slaughter. He looks to Will and then reaches to remove the key from around his neck to drape it over Will’s instead.

Clad only in the blanket, now as much his as anything is here, the body-warmed brass lies impossibly heavy against Will’s bare chest. He lifts the little thing and looks to Hannibal, questioning. Bottom lip held between his teeth, he folds his fist around it and seeks for words that might possibly begin to convey the monsoon emotions inside himself.

He wants to thank him.

He wants to tell him off.

He wants to tell him he misses him still, maybe more now than ever with his lost form found again but his spirit cast to perdition. Instead of fumbling over poorly chosen words, all of which Will knows he’d regret in some way or another, he lets the key rest once more against his bony chest. Tired fingers curl around the loop of cordage on his wrist, worn black and smooth from filth and exposure, and it slides easily off his thinned hand.

With neither eye contact nor explanation, Will offers back this key of his own.

Hannibal takes it carefully, treats it gently and allows his eyes to look over it as he runs his thumb against the old braiding. It was their first rope, the lines were uneven and the knots too large. They laughed making it, correcting each other and making mistakes when it was their turn. Hannibal remembers that day. He remembers all of them. He doesn’t dare to undo it to retie it around his own wrist, instead he pulls his knife out and cuts a new switch of fiber from the same plant, bending the bracelet in half and attaching the new, white strip to each looped end, securing it that way.

Old meets new. Different in appearance but not the stuff they’re made of. He flexes his hand and after a moment of thought turns the knife in his palm and hands it handle-first to Will.

“Most can be eaten raw,” Hannibal reminds him quietly. “I have not planted arum here. Some are seasonal, but this garden provides for me throughout the year. You will never be hungry.”

Will watches past him, around him, down his stoic form and to the blade offered out. Animal instinct stings metallic on his tongue as the knife settles heavy in his hand, but the burn of sudden power that singes in his veins darkens like red-hot metal cast into water, swiftly hissing to coolness. Will parts his lips with his tongue, and brings the weapon closer.

No, not a weapon, though it can be if needed.

A tool, to cut and dig, to dress and harvest.

“You - this is…”

The leather around the handle has been changed. The blade dulled from use and sharpening. There’s a divot nicked from the side of it but Will knows this knife as suddenly as he knew Hannibal. It was all that kept him alive before he found Hannibal; both taken from him, he spent the years since damn closer to dying.

“Please eat,” is all Hannibal tells him, letting go of Will when he’s sure the man can stand on his own, and stepping back towards the door leading back into the church. Should Will wish to lock himself out here, there is no other key to open the door - Hannibal did not lie to him. Should he wish to return, he need only walk from this door back to Hannibal’s, it will be open to him.

Another day, Hannibal will give him that power. But today, weak and little as he is, Hannibal supervises only for fear that Will will find the fresh air overwhelming and collapse in the grass. He sits on one of the old stone benches at the very end of the garden and looks up at the sky. The garden was a ruin when he had first been brought here. It had been let grow wild, and in the new swampy mess that the ground became, most of the plants died or rotted. Once Hannibal was given permission to unlock the door, he was allowed - on days the warlord felt particularly charitable, when Hannibal had been particularly good at bending as he should - to tend it in his own time, let it grow and collect seeds to bring back to it when he was taken with the raiding parties.

Slowly, it became his only sanctuary. Slowly, he let it grow to the wild and beautiful thing that he and Will once planned together, always tending it and plucking it free of weeds, sitting with the plants surrounding him and letting himself breathe them in.

He had imagined another life here, often. It’s surreal to see the man of his fantasies and childish hopes actually walking the little paths, now, alive and growing stronger on a promise made long ago and kept despite the worst of life’s circumstances and cruelties. He would not broach the cobweb-thin trust between them by telling him that he’s as beautiful now as he ever was, but in the privacy of his thoughts, Hannibal allows that seed to send out a tender shoot.

It’s the persimmons where Will finally stops. He wraps the blanket over his shoulders and stretches toward the nearest fruit, plucking it free. Knife held as if it were a part of himself, and Hannibal allows that perhaps it’s always been, he slices a portion of it neatly free and slowly done with his hands shaking bad as they are. Will sets the fruit between his lips and sucks it onto his tongue. A groan unbidden rises ecstatic alongside gnarled snarling of his belly. Juice and spittle stripe his chin and Will tries to catch it with his fingers to lick them clean and not waste a drop.

Both have made allowances here, in this eerily still space. Hannibal gives Will things he thought were lost - his father’s knife, food that will not warp his soul to eat, freedom to move as he likes. Will gives him the satisfaction of seeing him eat, of a rueful smile tilted quick and crooked in unfamiliar pleasure, the knowledge that Will in this way will sustain himself.

“Always had a green thumb,” Will remarks.

“Plants always made more sense than people,” Hannibal remarks, keeping his voice quiet, only loud enough to be heard by Will, not to carry. “And once you start raising them, it’s impossible to let them die. I spend months of the year here alone. I think they’ll appreciate when I bring company.”

Still they can’t bring themselves to address the other, still they speak around the reality unfurling readily as the leaves and blooms and ripe fruits around them. They speak at distance. They speak of the other as if they were a phantom that would suddenly arise should they address it directly.

It’s a start, at least, to acknowledge the other at all beyond demands and execrations.

Will finishes the fruit and resting his knife against his thighs, crouches low to the blackberries beneath. They stain his fingers scarlet, wedge seeds between his teeth. He tries to force himself to slow but can’t, stopping only to breathe, the side of his hand pressed against his mouth.

“Gonna eat until I’m sick,” he says, a low laugh curling warm from inside.

“There will be more,” Hannibal allows, too unfamiliar with the muscles necessary to smile to realize that he has, until his cheeks ache.

“Do you preserve it at all?” Will asks. He realizes how silly the question is after he asks it, how borne of lifelong habits to ration and keep and delay. “I reckon there’s no point, what with so many mouths to keep fed.”

“So few that would appreciate it,” Hannibal allows. “It’s difficult to find sugar, to preserve any of the fruits or berries. I salt some of the roots. A lot of the seeds I grind to flour, and from that make bread. The first few years were hungry, with the garden, until it took.”

He smiles again and turns to watch Will suck the juice from his fingers. He knows Will will be sick tonight, simply because his stomach is not used to having anything in it. But slowly he will grow used to eating again, he will grow used to working with the coarse flour to make bread to his liking. He may even return to trapping, when birds and small animals make their way into the garden to gorge on the ripe fruits and heavy roots.

The thought warms him.

Belly heavy, heart racing with the sensation of life grasped back from unspooling threads, Will sits back slowly on the sun-warmed path. He keeps his knife at his side and the blanket wrapped around himself, but bares his shoulders to the sky and runs a hand through his hair, goosebumps prickling his skin. Across him, a short distance away, sits Hannibal, watching him with the same curiosity that flirts with feigned indifference. He wears cloth strips wrapped around his knuckles should he need to use them unexpectedly. Will wonders who stitched together the rest, the stiff leather pants and weather-softened shirt. He doesn’t have to ask - he knows as soon as he considers the question.

Hannibal has learned far more than Will might have ever reckoned. It stings a little, but only scarcely, to think that Hannibal moved on without him. He didn’t. That didn’t happen, no matter what rot Will’s dismay spreads through him. He was taken. Kidnapped.

Forced.

Changed.

He licks the taste of fruit from his lips, and leans back. The blanket lays over his thighs and the sun pinkens his cheeks.

“So is this living,” Will asks, “or surviving?”

Hannibal laughs, but it’s hardly a sound of pleasure or delight. “It’s neither,” he admits. “Desperation. Tenuous grip on the latter while trying to protect the former for someone and something that matters.”

Hannibal doesn’t move towards Will, he lets him enjoy the sun and the garden unhindered and untouched. He will find clothes for him, make some if Will refuses them as he did the food. He will give him a large canteen to carry at his belt that he can fill with water from the barrel. He will make sure his men think he claims and reclaims Will every night, and that he is untouchable.

Beyond this garden, and beyond the door of their room, Will is nothing. But within those safe havens they can both breathe without fear of causing suspicion.

“And you?” he asks.

The question, addressed directly, spreads as hot beneath Will’s skin as the sun does atop it. He sucks his bottom lip between his teeth and can think only of the first time they spoke of this, pinning each other to soft spring grass and wrestling with spindly limbs and laughing against the other’s mouth. Will’s fingers curl against the path as they cannot curl in that boy’s hair. He tilts back his head to feel the sun kiss his skin in place of warm lips.

“Grit,” he decides, with a rueful smile. “Stubborn persistence, when I learned that living and surviving were two different things. They felt like the same before. And without the reason to live, I stopped caring so much about surviving. Only kept moving because I’d scolded you so goddamn hard about giving up if something ha-...”

He stops, the slip of tongue as sweet as berries and bitter as bile, and meets Hannibal’s gaze as his breath leaves him.

“I kept going because I didn’t know how to rightfully quit,” Will finally says, “and because I hoped, even when what I hoped for seemed less likely every day.”

“I hated my hope for years,” Hannibal admits. “Tantalizing and cruel at once, and impossible to give up. It’s an addiction none of us knew we had, I don’t think, and yet when it becomes the most necessary, and when we want it least, that is when we cannot let it go.”

They are quiet for a while, and neither feel the pressing urge to speak again. Beyond the door, the men in the church start to wake, making sound as they walk over the wooden floors, as they stoke some of the dying fires or open the heavy front doors. Hannibal looks over his shoulder but shows no inclination to go back inside. When he turns back to Will, his eyes are hooded in that quiet pensive way Will remembers from a decade before.

“Sometimes I stay here for hours,” he sighs, “just listening. Pretending I don’t have to be anywhere else. They’ve long ago stopped questioning. Do you think they’ll seek for me if we stay here a little longer?”

Will’s brows knit and he laughs, shaking his head. “How the hell would I know?”

“Guess,” Hannibal suggests, “and I’ll take it as gospel.”

Fighting down his smile, Will gives earnest consideration to the inquiry and finally shakes his head. “Not for a while more.”

“Why not?”

“Just waking up,” Will shrugs, puffing out a breath as much to ease his upset stomach as anything. “Some’ll sleep later than others, but even when they’re up, too… gotta take a piss. Maybe wander out for a shit. Stretch and scratch. They’ll revel in you not being there for a bit, allowed to be lazy. Eventually they’ll get bored and come seeking,” he wagers.

Hannibal spreads a hand across his face and huffs a single note of amusement against his palm before letting it slip to his lap. “Remarkable,” he sighs. “Should I -”

“Will you -”

Their words collide and both yield. Permission is asked and granted, and Will stretches and sprawls along his belly to reach for another handful of berries. He lays prone, back and legs bared to the sun but for the strip of blanket over his bottom. It isn’t intentional, Hannibal knows, and that’s what makes it so beautiful.

Neither speak, again, and as Will grows drowsy in the sun, Hannibal stretches out on the bench to lie on his back, one leg on the ground and the other knee drawn up. He drapes an arm over his eyes and eases his breathing. Hannibal hones his hearing not towards the church but towards the garden, towards the birds and animals beyond. He concentrates on their calls and fluttering of wings, and on the quiet scratches of small animals against the dirt. He concentrates on Will’s breathing.

By the time there are impatient sounds beyond the door, Hannibal is dozing and Will is asleep entirely, belly full and sun-warmed. Hannibal wakes slowly and tilts his head to study Will like this, sprawled and lovely and clean, slowly returning to himself, meal by meal from the garden they will tend together.

“Will,” he calls quietly, again and again, never once raising his voice, until Will wakes with a quiet groan and a stretch. “I’m returning inside. You needn’t, if you wish to spend the day out here.”

The blanket slips loose as Will bends back onto his knees, arms stretched trembling before himself. For a moment he pays no mind to his nudity, though Hannibal cannot help but do so. They spent as many days bare and wild together as they did clothed; in their world, there was no need to keep anything from the other, or the world which only they inhabited.

It’s only as an afterthought that Will gathers the spread of cloth around himself, wrapped around his waist and thrown over his shoulder to keep it in place. Hannibal recalls like the distant strains of a song heard only once that ancient peoples used to wear something much the same. Will picks up his knife, and plucks down three more persimmons to bear against his chest where the key rests.

“Already sunburnt,” Will explains. “Can I come out again, later?”

“Whenever you like.”

“I can leave the room,” he asks, more carefully this time. “Maybe you ought to just tell me where you want me.”

“Safe,” is all Hannibal says. “Allow me to put on the necessary show for the men to know not to touch you. Allow me to give you the freedom to walk clothed and as you wish between the room and garden, and you may come and go at your whim.”

Will watches him, fingers curling in the blanket and relaxing again, just once. The unspoken question remains between them like a weight, and as Will does not ask, so Hannibal does not answer. It is clear what he would say needs be done.

“I apologize for the cruelties I will need to pretend to lash upon you, but we will need to return together, if we go now.”

Will crooks a smile, small and wavering but not poisonous as they’ve been before today. He inclines his head, innate southern courtesy woven through his core, and steps closer with the ripe fruits cradled to his chest and the knife held loose in his hand. Hannibal’s muscles tighten in a snap of instinct and release just as quickly.

Will would not hurt him, not like that.

And if he did, then let it be so, and with his blood would flow the words staunched inside his body.

“You gonna carry me in again?” Will asks, squinting a little. “Over your shoulder, like a war-prize?”

Hannibal’s lips quirk, and his smile shows foremost in his eyes. “Would you let me?”

“Just don’t fuck up my fruit,” Will decides.

Hannibal holds out his hand for the knife, just until they return safely behind closed doors, and then steps nearer to Will and narrows his eyes.

“Language,” he murmurs, and then bends his knees to hoist Will over his shoulder.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I don’t care,” Will mutters, “what his name is. I care why he’s still alive. Why he’s here, after what he did to you, to us -”_
> 
> _“A devil who offers shelter is still better than his peers,” Hannibal replies quietly._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

The wind is knocked from Will’s lungs as he’s slung weightless over the warlord’s shoulder. He sputters a laugh that sounds like struggle, straining to keep his persimmons from falling out of his arms. One of the waxy red fruits slips free as Hannibal opens the door, and the warlord snares it readily before it hits the ground, ducking swiftly and rising slowly.

He spreads a slim smile of triumph to those nearest the door, who watch with envy and amusement as Hannibal rips a bite out of the fruit and pitches it to them. They’re hardly starved but they clamor as dogs after a bone, and as Hannibal turns to shut and lock the door, bending Will deep enough to do so, howls uprise behind them at the glimpse of flesh they’re given.

Will grabs against Hannibal’s back with his free hand, teeth bared from the mistreatment, the display, the disgusting remarks hurtled at him. He gouges into skin with his nails and relents only when Hannibal’s steps towards his chambers bounce his grip free.

“When you gonna share, boss?” a man calls.

“When I’ve broken him of his habit of keeping silent,” Hannibal replies, slipping a hand up beneath the blanket, a show of groping that never reaches higher than Will’s thigh. “He has such a lovely voice when I pull it from him.”

“Want some help, then?” Laughter, at that, and Hannibal rests by the door, turning Will’s face away from them all again as he levels his men with a look.

“You want my cock in your ass, you ask nicely,” he replies, and the men whoop as Hannibal works open this door and steps into it, kicking it closed as he slips Will from his shoulder, enough for the men to assume he will be tossed to the bed.

Instead, Will is set carefully down until he has his balance, and Hannibal offers a smile of apology.

“I shall have to retrieve a persimmon for you,” he says.

“One fuckin’ thing I told you,” Will whispers, emboldening his voice as if it might make up for the tremors that curl his sinews tight. His heart beats too fast in stark recognition of his own frailty. He could have been thrown to them and scarcely landed more than a blow. They could have grabbed him and dragged him off. Will sucks a breath in hard and holds it just long enough to man up out of his fear, lifting his eyes to the amber-dark ones that search his gaze.

The warlord need say nothing to convey what Will knows. The moment has only a door closed in its middle. It has not yet passed.

He cradles the fruit against himself and steps back from Hannibal. If this is to be a claiming, as they want to hear - if this is to be a taking, as the warlord must convey - then Will can make it one. Will’s heart hammers against his ribs as it did when they chased each other through tall grass and over sticky marsh. His mouth dries as it did before he was pinned and grasped and held and they wrestled bodies and lips slick together.

“Set them down,” Hannibal mouths, gesturing to the small crate by the bed he uses as a table, and Will shakes his head before thinking better of it and setting his precious meal down. His blanket is still around his waist and Hannibal makes no more to remove it, instead he calmly shoves his fist against a wall and sighs heavily.

Beyond the door come some sounds of interest, a few whoops of encouragement, but this early in the morning, the men are more interested in their leftover dinner for breakfast, in the wine still left around in mugs and chipped bottles, in the weather, to see what the day will bring. Hannibal smiles and tilts his head for Will to get into bed.

Will rolls his feet as he walks across the floor, to mute his steps closer. It’s a game, he tells himself. It’s a game and nothing more, he is in little greater peril now than he was when they wrestled aimless and snorting laughter a decade before. So if it’s a game, he reasons, he can help to make the rules.

It’s just as much a test, to see if the illusion holds, but this thought is fleeting. As when one catches themselves dreaming and risks waking rather than directing, Will lets his considerations not linger long. Nor does the blanket, peeled loose from bony hips and narrow waist, and chucked with a slap against the door.

A break in the ceaseless muttering outside gives him some small satisfaction. Far greater is found when the warlord bends obedient to lift up Will’s blanket and toss it to the bed where Will slinks and lays flat on his belly. The sun has burnt his back and left it tingling. Hannibal’s hooded gaze sparks Will’s nerves more electric still.

As Will arches, just a little, Hannibal’s breath catches and he closes his eyes. A sharp slap makes Will jerk against the bed and softly cry out in surprise, but the sound is harsher than the blow of Hannibal’s fist against his palm, perfectly calculated to carry beyond the door. Will watches Hannibal over his shoulder, obediently closes his eyes and moans softly into the blanket with every new strike, pitching his voice before he rolls to his back and hisses at the scrape of sensitive skin against the roughened material.

He is still sore. He is still tired. He’s starving, and knows that he must feed himself slowly so as not to get sick. He watches Hannibal with parted lips and barely open eyes, and the warlord watches him back.

An arched brow is all it takes for Will to spread his lips and groan, the sound drawn up low from the pit of his belly. He reaches back with his better hand and snares the headboard, shuddering it hard against the wall. Hannibal tilts his head, hands parted, and together they time another clatter of sound.

Will can imagine what they think they’re hearing out there, sounds presumed to be carnal, feral minds running amok with the noises they can hear in the chamber from which they’re barred. He can imagine, too, where Hannibal’s mind goes as Will lays barren and raw and somehow still unscathed before him. Will tilts a knee to the bed. His cock rests limp against his hip. He bites his lip and keens, chest upheaved towards the ceiling.

Hannibal’s cheeks darken and he turns away. Not in disgust, not in embarrassment, but in a kind of almost childish desire to keep Will’s body his own until he genuinely wants to share it. Will makes another helpless sound and draws his nails over the wall, curling his hand into a fist at the end.

“Not such a quiet bitch now,” someone says from beyond the door, a few men laugh, a few slap their palms against the heavy wood before going about their way. Hannibal allows several moments more of this pretense before gently holding a hand up for Will to stop, allowing him to loudly catch his breath as he himself approaches the bed and takes another blanket from beneath it.

“Rest,” he encourages him. “I must see to a few things. Do not go to the garden again today. I will bring you something in the evening. We will go together when you’re stronger.”

Hannibal’s words quiet the roiling of Will’s body all at once. The game Will thought they were playing ends with all the shock of a door banging open and bones cracking. Breath still short as he struggles to catch it again, Will blinks himself back to here. To now. To the warlord before him. To the ache that rattles his bones like church bells ringing as if to summon back the boy he loved.

How many times is a man expected to wake so sharply from a dream before he decides to live within it?

“I thought…”

Will doesn’t know what he thought. A little morning sun does not stop the fog from welling up again. Fingers pressed seeking to stalwart walls are not enough to break them down.

“Rest,” Hannibal asks, so gently that the sweetness of it ferments in Will’s stomach and he’s forced to choke it back down. “Just rest.”

With berry-stained fingers, Will drags the offered blanket over his battered body, hiding it away without protest.

Hannibal reaches out as though to touch Will’s hair and Will closes his eyes. Not in anticipation of pain, not in fear, but perhaps to sink into that dream once more. But Hannibal does not touch him, his palm skims so near Will’s hair as to just barely move it, but he does not slip his fingers through his curls as he had once.

Not here.

And then without a word he goes to the door and yanks it open, slamming it closed immediately after and turning the key.

Will sleeps better than he has in weeks, and doesn’t wake until the evening.

\---

After a week of fruit, Will turns to the reeds and root vegetables. Within the room he shares with the warlord, there is a pit with a fire, as there are all throughout the church beyond. Within it, they push potatoes into the embers and wait for them to bake, they soften harder reeds with the smoke, they heat water and within it drop pieces of persimmon and berries for sweetness.

Will sleeps less and moves more, returning his strength by hooking his fingers over the wooden beams and hoisting himself up against them. Over and over, until his muscles return to a semblance of their previous pliancy. He sleeps on the floor unless it is the day time, and he plays along with every game they put on for the men behind the door.

It becomes akin to the work Will once knew. Ceaseless focus on what needs to be done that day, though keenly aware that his existence is less imperiled than it’s perhaps ever been. The irony is not lost on him.

He is allowed passage between the warlord’s chambers and the garden and back again. Subject to hissed epithets and snarled whispers of threat and desire, Will continues on with little more heed paid to them than the sigh of wind in leaves - and in truth, this holds his attention in a far greater way. After a while, Will is allowed to keep his knife on his person, strapped to his thigh with carefully braided bands of leather. This quiets their chattering for a time.

He spends his days in the garden, uprooting weeds and training vines, plucking suckers and bringing in ripe fruit before it can fall to decay. Some he leaves, for the little birds that dare venture close. Will sits for hours, growing sun-bright and golden, and listens to their cheerful songs as he makes his muscles work in whatever ways pull them strong and sore.

Will does not call it worry that keeps him awake when on certain nights Hannibal doesn’t return to his chambers. He listens, keenly, his ear to the floor for the howling triumphant horde to return. Hannibal’s voice carries deep and grand through the church. Will listens only to its vibrations and not the words he says. The door scrapes open and Will is on his feet, clad in soft old linen and the blanket that girds him like armor.

Hannibal’s eyes look scarlet as the blood that slicks from a cut in his side. He wears a ferocious stripe of black across his eyes that render him almost inhuman. Almost, but for the dark spurt past his pale fingers. Almost, but for the blood that clots thick upon the floor.

Will tells him to lay down and hush, and using a stiff needle of ivory-white bone and finely woven thread, he stitches up the wound with fingers far steadier than they’ve any right to be.

Hannibal makes no sound, just heavy breathing and the occasional clench of his fingers against the sheets. Though Will works quickly, precisely, stretching skin to snap through and looping it snugly together, Hannibal’s face pales. His lips part and his brows furrow. From behind the smear of black tears slip down his cheeks but he still makes no sound. None at all.

No stoicism is needed here, not behind a closed door, not away from prying eyes, and not with Will, but it occurs to him that perhaps Hannibal has forgotten how to respond to pain. Perhaps he has been taught, with cruel words and cruel hands, to remain silent through such terrible things.

When Will sets the needle away, Hannibal doesn’t open his eyes and does not let go of the soaked blanket. He moves only when Will tells him he will warm water for a bath, and asks softly for it to remain cold, just to start. When the water touches his skin, Hannibal hisses, when it washes away the clots and dirt and reveals the stitches Will meticulously worked against him. He sways and Will reaches for him, and for a moment their fingers slip together and then, only then, Hannibal makes a sound, a sobbing hitch of breath, and then nothing more.

Will does not burden him with the indignity of observation, eyes averted as he reaches for the little cut of soap. Neither, however, does he pull his hand away, instead linking their fingers together and squeezing firm. It’s alright, Will says, without saying a word. You’re alright. Do what you need.

Gently, awkwardly so as not to unjoin their hands’ embrace, Will stretches across him to wash away the black and scarlet marks of his ignominy. There’s no place for that here in this room; it makes Hannibal into something that his tears betray his unwillingness to be. No more does Will care to see him filthied with road-dust and oil and greasepaint and gore, and under careful ministrations he sluices it from muscles and scars and tender swathes of pale skin alike. The water blackens with his sins. Will curls his hand over the soap to lather his fingers before setting it aside, to wash clean Hannibal’s face.

Beneath his eyes and over his brow, scrubbed firm against his hairline and flat along his scruffy jaw. Hannibal watches him, so close and focused, but Will does not meet his gaze until the tears have slowed. No man likes to be seen crying. He drags a thumb over Hannibal’s lips and scrubs them clean with a small smile.

“Come on,” Will says. “Hop up and let me rinse you off.”

Hannibal moves, he lets Will wash him clean, he turns into his touches like a cat and shivers as the water slips over now-clean skin and to the drain.

“I’ll need to go back out,” Hannibal says quietly. Will frowns.

“I’m sure you can give the victory speech after you have a fucking nap,” he mutters, and Hannibal laughs, just a brief huff of air, and shakes his head.

“Not to them,” he says. “To the garden. The last of the persimmons will fall if I don’t collect them for you.”

Will pours out the rest of the cup over his hair, and sweeps it back from his face. The grin that comes is sudden as the sun piercing a storm, almost too bright, just as tenuous with black clouds still crowding close. The warpaint is gone, the blood and filth rinsed to reveal the man beneath the warlord. And when he smiles, God when he smiles, for the first time in unconscionable years, Will sees that boy he loved.

Depthless eyes and crooked teeth, cheekbones so sharp you could tan leather with them and a jaw carved as if from solid oak. A body that Will could spend a lifetime discovering. A loyal heart thundering strong within.

Will lets his hand linger a moment more, just against Hannibal’s cheek, and when he steps away it’s with a smile.

“I can get them,” Will says, gathering up his blanket from the ground. “Make a real show of it so they know why you ain’t comin’ back out just yet.”

Hannibal laughs softly again and inclines his head in allowance. He’s tired. He’s weak and sore and the last thing he wants is to play up the aggressor and the cruel master before a rabble of men who care little for anything but his approval and when their next victim is coming.

He watches Will work open the buttons on his shirt, sliding one side of the collar down his shoulder and drawing his nails against the skin to redden it. He watches Will muss up his hair by tugging it every which way. He watches Will check the key against his chest and strap his knife against his thigh before opening the door and stumbling out, hissing a breath at the jeers he immediately receives.

Hannibal waits for what feels like hours, though he knows it’s only moments. He manages to get the towel around himself and to stumble to bed. By the time Will returns, he’s no longer awake to see Will lay on his stomach beside him, with an arm beneath his head, curled and little and safe enough to sleep this way for the first time in many, many months.

\---

Will spends most waking hours in the garden, eating his fill of what the late summer still provides and preparing the space for winter's imminent arrival. His heart settles to the slow-moving steady rhythm that has always found its peace amidst green things and quiet places. It's been so many years since his belly was full for longer than a day that the roundness of his slender stomach is a novelty. It's been longer still since he's had no fear whatsoever as to whether he'd survive the night.

He has seen men snuffed into nonexistence for attempting to harass him.

He has seen the fear and hate in the eyes of certain men for being so near and yet untouchable.

Will has learned not to let the moods linger, his own righteous indignation for being treated like a prize, like a weak thing in need of protection. If that's the worst of his concerns, and it certainly is not, then he's doing damn well for himself. There are worse insults to harbor than hearing one's manhood questioned, no matter how even knowing that, the words still stick thorny beneath his skin.

He keeps his skin shaved and his hair cut, just long enough that the curls twist against his face. Washed and wrapped in clothes light enough to let the breeze through, at times Will finds himself in fascination of his own existence here. He feels like a holy thing, when the demons that possess this once-sacred ground snarl and snap at his ankles but cannot touch him.

But the nature of the god that's claimed him is at times oblique, and Will stops dead in his tracks when he hears the man speak.

"Fuck is this, boyle?" he man spits, holding up a blunted knife. "Y'think y'can do anything with it? What'll you do, annoy them to death?" He jabs it against the flat swath of leather on his stomach and laughs, the men around him joining in the jest. He tosses the blade back to the floor and smears the back of his hand beneath his nose. "Sharpen it, or I'll make sure it's bright enough to clean hide and you won't like the one I fuckin' choose."

Kincaid turns toward Will, standing still beside the garden door. Only his bare feet are dirty, mud clinging between his toes and smeared up to his ankles. Will lowers his hand slowly, letting bull grapes slip to the floor and setting his hand to the hilt of his knife.

"I know you," Will whispers. The leather strap holding his blade slicks free.

Kincaid sniffs, taking Will in from toes to hair, and tilts his body in a way that opens up his shoulders, presents his chest, builds himself bigger in the eyes of the smaller man.

“Move along, pretty thing,” he drawls. “Would hate for your master to find you made a mess of, eh?”

There is no recognition in his eyes and when he turns away it takes everything Will has not to lunge at the man with his weapon - far sharper than the blunt thing he had been laughing at. It takes everything not to break from his submissive, beaten-down role and become like the men he hates so much.

 _Pretty_.

The word turns Will’s stomach. He felt it hissed against his skin when he tied himself to high branches to sleep the night, he felt it every time his wrist ached in winter, he felt it every time he thought of the lovely boy who had sacrificed himself for him. Will swallows and crouches to get the grapes from the ground. He doesn’t sheathe his knife as he returns to the room, and pressing his back against the door he tries to catch his breath.

Something needs to break. Glass, were there any still whole to shatter. Bones, his own or someone else’s. Skin and the vessels beneath until all around his feet lie a destruction that might begin to measure against the years of hate grown thick as weeds in the darkest corners of his soul. He restrains himself only because he’s shaking so hard he’s not certain he could land the blow he wants to place deep into the belly of that man, gouged over slick organs to split them wide and watch his essence pool black on the church floor.

There’s a rustle of water from within the bathroom and Will sucks his lips between his teeth. Biting down against them, he lays his grapes aside on the bed and forces the knife from his fingers beside.

“Why is he here?” Will asks. The warlord makes an inquisitive sound. “The Irishman - the one who -”

Hurt you.

Hurt me.

Broke down the door and destroyed the world a second time.

“Why?” Will hisses, turning with hard flat steps into the washroom where Hannibal lays lax in a bath that smells of sassafras and wildflowers.

Hannibal turns his head and lets it rest against his shoulder, brows furrowed as he watches Will, furious, cup his hands and splash some water from the barrel on his face. For a moment he doesn’t respond, thinks through the words and the accusation and the anger, and finally makes a sound of understanding.

“Kincaid,” he says.

“I don’t care,” Will mutters, “what his name is. I care why he’s still alive. Why he’s here, after what he did to you, to us -”

“A devil who offers shelter is still better than his peers,” Hannibal replies quietly.

“And what about the one the destroys it?” Will demands. He tilts his head in warning to Hannibal’s fingers when they raise, ignoring the signal to lower his voice. “Don’t you dare try that shit with me. I’m not one of them out there and I don’t give a shit if they hear me.”

Hannibal bends his lips together, the only sign of his own tension before he releases it and lowers his hand into the water again. “Will you listen, then,” Hannibal asks, “if I tell you that he kept me safe from what could have been far worse fates?”

With a sharp breath drawn and held spread in his lungs until they burn, Will keeps his words at bay though they slice sharp where he presses his tongue to the back of his teeth. “You’re defending him,” he says.

“He did so for me, more times than I care to recollect.”

“He took you from me,” Will hisses.

Hannibal swallows thickly and stares at the water. He doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t defend Kincaid in that. He did take Hannibal from Will. He did destroy their home and their lives for no other reason than because Hannibal had picked a lock on a door.

“Despite his cruelties, he has kept me alive so that I may find you again.”

“I’m sure,” Will snorts.

“Not in those words,” Hannibal agrees, “and I am certain for his own reasons, but be that as it may, he never laid a hand on me in my captivity. He did not instigate nor encourage abuse. His deeds are unforgivable and he is a rancid specimen of a human being but I owe him,” Hannibal emphasizes, lifting his eyes in apology, in anguish, to his friend. “I owe him my life, and so I have allowed him his.”

Will’s fingers curl and loosen. He goes to the battered pot and fills it from the barrel, sloshing onto the floor as he carries it to the fire to start it heating and warm water anew for Hannibal’s bath. Every step, every twitch of muscle and flick of flint, Will both loathes and finds solace within. There is peace in work, giving his hands something to do that isn’t destroy. Funneling that flickering, electric energy sparking hot into an act of production rather than destruction.

“I didn’t promise that,” Will argues, though he can hear how petulant he sounds. “I never gave him that guarantee. Kincaid,” he says, spitting curt against the floor to clear the taste of the man’s name from his mouth and frowning at his cruelty in doing so. “I swore I’d kill any one of them that I could find.”

Hannibal watches him as he stokes the fire with sharp jabs, knocking embers loose. Long ago they spoke of killing, Hannibal curious why Will assured him with such certainty that there was no place in their world for that beyond survival. They never hunted. They never chased creatures down to do harm to them. Will’s words ache deep in Hannibal’s bones, the sight of him so changed, but he does not fault him for that, and regret is an emotion with which Hannibal is all too familiar to pay it more heed than its due.

“Will you stop me?” Will asks.

Hannibal shakes his head. “No.”

And that’s enough, enough for Will to cast down the fire-hardened stick and shove his hand back into his hair. Enough for him to breathe, expelling the hate inside himself for now and drawing in cleaner air. His leg jostles and he rubs his bum wrist, seated on the stool beside the fire. Neither speak again as the water warms, until fine lacy bubbles form upon its surface and Will hoists it, grimacing at the weight.

Setting a knee to the edge of the tub, he tilts the water in carefully, not directly onto the man inside but around him. Watching only the steam rise anew, Will sucks his bottom lip between his teeth and works it free.

“It must’ve been bad,” he says, “if he came out of it with a pardon.”

Hannibal’s eyes glaze a little and for a long time he says nothing, he doesn’t blink, he holds his breath before releasing it with a small sound through his nose. He brings a hand to the side of the tub and reaches for a cloth. Soaking it in the water before laying it over his eyes and forehead, he sinks lower into the tub and allows his knees to pierce the water.

“The man who took me had no qualms,” he starts, “in sharing my company around his men. From the first camp where he made it clear I was his to use and take, to the last, where I straddled his chest and drew his own knife across his throat so he could watch me, and know I was his end.”

Hannibal licks his lips and swallows, a smile tugging them wide, even though his voice is bitter when he speaks again.

“The rape was hardly the worst,” he continues. “That I could bite back the sounds for, use balms I began to make on the ripped and bruised skin. Marks healed and passed but it was the doors. The doors he had me open.” Hannibal’s voice breaks softly and he clears his throat, slipping the cloth down his face to wet it anew before slapping it against his face once more. “Storage. Safes. Panic rooms,” Hannibal holds his breath. “Some were empty -”

Will sets the pot to the ground and rests his hip against the tub’s edge. Hannibal’s breath moves his belly too quickly, and Will sets a hand to it, no more than that. He lets him mask himself, to separate those deeds from…

From himself. From Will. From the memories that Hannibal feels with the same sudden sharp stabs as Will feels them, too.

Hannibal tells him of the people they found. The families, lost in time and terrified to find their tiny worlds uprooted. His voice cracks into whispers. Always the first to see them, always the first upon which they looked in rightful horror. He was made to hunt them. Made to kill. Made to eat or the beatings were worse.

Will’s throat tightens and squeezes out a sound.

“They got what they wanted,” Hannibal says. “From behind every locked door, until I could no more keep my own shut than any other. They got that too. A body to do their bidding. A mind to work apart. But they ate that boy’s heart just like the rest.”

“No,” Will says. Hannibal’s throat jerks but he does not move, curled fists and clenched jaw. “No,” he says again, laying his hand on Hannibal’s chest. “Nobody, nothing can take that. You’ve gotta give it for it to be gone.”

Hannibal’s heart hammers like a bird caught in a cage and he does laugh then, nervous and too-loud, one hand pressing the cloth against his eyes.

“It’s so naive,” he manages. “God, that’s so naive. I thought for months that because I gave my heart to you, that no one else could have it. But day by day it grew colder and sicker, more and more rotten with every door I opened, and every meal I ate, and every time I crawled into the bed and spread my legs and let him have me.” Hannibal slips the cloth from his eyes and turns to look at Will, brows furrowed and lips parted in something like confusion, though he understands his own words, understands his own pain, and Will’s, so clearly.

“I let him die because he was no longer the boy you loved, he was no longer the person you thought strong and valiant. He was a coward who allowed himself to succumb to this instead of fighting it, instead of running, instead of turning the knife on himself and never opening another door again.”

Will draws a breath as if the words were a blow. They are, much as the intangible can sink like a fist into the belly of another, but worse still for being aimed at himself. Hannibal stands before he can speak, water sloshing from the tub and dripping down his form. The rag is tossed with a smack to the floor. He snares up the towel as he passes, and Will works quickly to extinguish the little flame still lingering, all the while stoking the one inside him.

“If a word of that were true -”

“Enough.”

“If a goddamn word of that were true, you’d not have stopped when you saw me.”

Hannibal runs the towel down his face and levels a coal-black gaze on him. Will raises his hands and drops them to his sides, brows lifted. Hannibal’s eyes narrow. “‘Monster’,” he repeats, feet clicking on the floor as he turns to face the broadside posture shown toward him. “After so long, the first thing you said to me when I knew you was that I am a monster.”

“And I’ve done worse than that, ain’t I?” Will demands. He too steps closer, feet apart and stance staid, both firm on their feet and responding with stiffened back and spread shoulders to the challenge of the other’s form so near. “They could’ve took me instead. They should’ve. It’s my fault.”

“Enough,” Hannibal snarls again.

“My fault you found the means to open that door. My fault you were at that place at all. My fault the house weren’t well-hid enough not to be seen and my fault you got taken and my fault I didn’t send you on your way when you were well enough to go,” Will tells him, every word a shove met finally in his hands jammed roughly to Hannibal’s chest. Hannibal catches his wrists, holding him firm as the towel pools at his feet.

“After all that,” Will whispers, so as to stop the onslaught of heat in his eyes from splitting wide his voice in pain, “you should’ve taken me there. You should’ve given me to them. Cut my throat for doing you just as wrong as that man did and you _didn’t_ , Hannibal.”

“Shut up,” Hannibal whispers, his own eyes just as wide, his own voice held beneath a breath to keep it from rising, from hurting.

“Be angry, let yourself be angry.”

“Stop.” He presses his forehead to Will’s and closes his eyes. Will tremble against him, stronger, now, than when he had first met him here, stronger, now, than he was even then, when nothing was cruel and nothing was wrong, and they were children together.

“Hit me!”

“ _Stop_ , Will,” Hannibal hisses, hands setting harsh to Will’s cheeks to hold him still as he kisses him, silencing his next words and swallowing the helpless sound Will gives him instead. He doesn’t let go when Will jerks away, lips torn apart as soon as they touched. A blink, a breath, air sucked down through tightened throat, and Will shoves hard against him, body and mouth and heart pressed against the man who doesn’t let him go.

Who never did, Will knows, no matter what he’s convinced himself.

Hannibal catches Will as he stumbles, snaring an arm around his waist and turning him towards the bed. Will goes with fingers gouging broad shoulders and red lines left in their wake. The bed betrays them with a squeak of ancient springs and Will watches the man in the instant they’re apart, lips bee-stung and bright red from the ferocity of their kiss.

Their desire.

Their desperate goddamn need to claw back what belongs to them.

“I missed you,” Will whispers.

“I’m here,” Hannibal promises him. “I’m here, I’ll never let you go again.”

He seeks with rough fingers over soft skin, against Will’s forehead and down his cheeks, thumbing over his wet lips that part with such wanton pleasure and need that Hannibal can barely breathe. He seeks and he bends to kiss Will properly again, eyes closing and sigh pushing hot against Will’s cheeks.

Hannibal’s hands slip down between them and work the belt off Will’s pants, work the catch that holds them on, and slip inside around the back to cup his ass and hold him as he rocks down. This is not like their childish play. Their bodies are harder, their bodies are stronger and have seen more and lived through worse than anything their young minds could have concocted. They fit, now, as they tried to then. They fit, now, as they should, and now Hannibal makes a sound against Will that he can’t control, weak and little and helpless and Will swallows it safe within himself.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _From the other, they’ll purge their woes and wrongdoings. Within the other’s arms they’ll immolate the darkness with the light they make together. Before they were slight little things, weak and wiry. They are ferocious now, forged in fire and stronger than they might have become had they not passed through those flames._
> 
> _Never again._
> 
> _Never fuckin’ again._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Will kicks loose his pants and shoves himself back further on the bed with what little purchase his heels can muster. It isn’t much, Hannibal’s hands on his ass, and Will laughs low as he’s yanked back down again. He writhes free of his shirt, and snares a hand hard against the back of Hannibal’s neck. Their brows press together and betwixt the other’s eyes each searches and now, now finds nothing wanting.

“Never fuckin’ again,” Will whispers.

Hannibal answers him in a savage kiss, unpracticed in this as they ever were, but weathered hard, their mouths are the flint that sparks fire between them. It catches quickly over the fallow fields of their skin and arid expanses of nerves shrivelled dry. Will’s ember-hot hand spreads down Hannibal’s chest, over that stalwart heart that beats in spite of all who tried to smother it. Hannibal licks flame against his tongue, and curls their lips smoldering swift and snarling when Will digs his nails to the back of Hannibal’s neck.

“Do me right,” he says, teeth bared as Hannibal bites so hard against his bottom lip that Will’s body upheaves roiling against him. Will pulls free and spreads Hannibal’s lips with his tongue, licking up the taste of him and sucking it from his lip. “You take that back. You take it back and give it to me instead, Hannibal.”

“God,” Hannibal sighs, turning Will’s face aside with the force of his kiss, parting his lips wide to kiss down his cheek and beneath his jaw, sucking hard enough that when Will moans it carries, that when he shivers beneath Hannibal’s weight it doesn’t feel like fear and disgust, but like something else entirely.

Will frees a hand and Hannibal immediately snares it to pin to the bed, spreading his fingers with Will’s and curling them together as they continue to rub against each other. Hannibal knows, now, what bodies can do together. In brief flares of accidental pleasure he knows how good it can be when done right, when done with kindness and adoration. He wants Will to feel that. He doesn’t want him to think of this and ache. He doesn’t want him to think of Hannibal’s past and obsess over his fault in making it come to pass.

He will make him feel good, in every way he can.

Never but for his own hand and Hannibal has Will felt this pleasure. No one before, no one after, has ever laid so heavy against him and left welcome marks against his throat. No one before, no one after, has ever dredged from the depths of Will’s body the sounds he makes now. He cares as little as he did there in the swamps that his voice carries. He wants Hannibal to hear and to know and to goddamn remember that he is loved.

He’s always been, no matter what poison slicked from their lips towards the other.

He always will be, no matter what sins he thinks stain his soul.

Will wraps a leg around Hannibal’s hip, calloused heel rubbing rough against thigh and down to dig against his calf. Their muscles coil in rhythmic serpentine shudders and dig their pointed hips together, leaving bruises that hardly matter when their cocks stiffen trapped between their stomachs. Will’s free hand winds through cornsilk strands of hair, and he bends Hannibal’s mouth against his own with a low moan.

From the other, they’ll purge their woes and wrongdoings. Within the other’s arms they’ll immolate the darkness with the light they make together. Before they were slight little things, weak and wiry. They are ferocious now, forged in fire and stronger than they might have become had they not passed through those flames.

Never again.

Never fuckin’ again.

Hannibal lavishes Will with clumsy kisses and hot sighs against him. He rubs his entire body over Will’s, seeking with his free hand to touch against his chest, to stroke his throat, to slip into his hair and arch Will’s back deeper for him.

He is lovely, lithe and elegant when he lets himself be. He is beautiful, ferocious and strong, all whipcord muscle and sun-bronzed skin. Will’s lips spread parting like blossoms and Hannibal savors their strange softness.

“What should we...” he sighs. “We can, like before...”

Will beseeches him with bent body and ceaseless kisses spread slick against whatever skin presents itself to him. Lips and jaw, chin and throat, twisting to kiss the wrist of the hand that presses to palm against his own. His lashes sink low but his eyes are open. It’s been too long that he couldn’t see Hannibal, and added time in which he refused to see him, so from the corners of his eyes he watches, tongue stroking the skin of Hannibal’s arm that gathers softly between his teeth and releases slow.

“Not like before,” Will says. “Not yet like that. Teach me what you know now. Show me what you learned and make it ours.”

Hannibal makes a soft sound and shakes his head, but it isn’t a denial - it is merely a fear that what he has learned, what he has been taught, is only violence and nothing more. And he will not hurt Will that way, he will not make him suffer like he was made to do in order to be here. Instead he kisses him, he slips one hand between them and he spreads Will’s legs carefully, smiling when Will arches up and spreads wider for him on his own.

“Sometimes it hurts,” he murmurs.

“Everything in this life hurts.”

Hannibal laughs and nods, stroking his fingers between Will’s cheeks, seeking against the most intimate part of him and rubbing, just rubbing, for now. Will shifts away from the touch but settles into it just as quickly. Brow creased and bottom lip bitten, he forces his legs to spread.

Though they long ago feared no part of the other and felt no shame towards any part of themselves, there is an exposure in this. Touched there, Hannibal’s fingers circling over clean skin, warm skin, hidden skin where Will’s never been touched before, Will feels more bared than he’s ever been. That’s not enough to stop his cock from stiffening though, in a steady twitch and fall against Hannibal’s belly and then his own. That raw revelation of secret places is not enough that Will wants him to stop, so instead he lets loose his lip and kisses him again.

Hannibal glides his finger into his own mouth when they part, a strand of spit stretching glistening from tongue to fingertip. Will’s muscles harden, apprehension cinching tight to his core, but their kiss entangles as Hannibal reaches between their bodies and strokes his hole again. That Hannibal was forced to this, that his pain was drunk down like a font of wine forever renewing and filling again and again…

“Breathe,” Hannibal whispers. With a harsh sigh, and fingernails dug against Hannibal’s back, Will does.

After teasing enough that Will makes a sound against him, Hannibal slips the tip of his finger into his hole and out again, watching Will respond to the strange tickling pleasure of it with wide eyes and a laugh that Hannibal kisses away. He thinks of when they played together, when they pressed their young cocks together and stroked, slipped Hannibal’s foreskin over Will’s and lost each other to pleasure, neither knowing how the other could feel but seeing that ecstasy painted on their faces and ruddy cheeks.

Hannibal slips his finger in deeper and in the same motion ducks his head to suck another mark against Will’s neck.

“God, I missed you,” Hannibal tells him, allowing a smile to break free now that they are together like this, both aching for the other, wanting them closer, with the time to share that closeness without interruption or fear of penalty. “I thought of you, every time I touched myself, every time I had a moment alone, in the tub or in the garden, in bed on early mornings with my hand between my thighs, I thought of you.”

Will curves his shoulders against the mattress and holding Hannibal’s gaze with his own - not past him, not through, not tilted toward ceiling or wall - he spans his free hand between their forms and splays his fingers. Stroking around where his friend’s finger pierces him, Will shudders out a moan that sounds nothing at all like the spiteful sounds he manifested on the warlord’s behalf for months on end. This sound aches. This sound carries. Keening upward in the way wild things call in spring for company, twisting outward and unfurling bright as blossoms, Will guides Hannibal’s finger deeper and his flinch is abated by a breathless laugh.

“Half the countryside’s heard your name by now,” Will sighs against his ear. “Every night, every morning. I cursed you being so goddamn brave. I begged for you to hear me when I touched myself and imagined it was you instead. There’s never been nobody else,” he says, words stilted only when a second finger seeks its entry. “For either of us, there’s only ever been us.”

Hannibal releases Will’s hand to grasp his thigh and bend his leg up higher. The stretch opens him and Will groans low as thunder, heart straining up against his ribs as that cage of bones arches upward. A hot drip slicks against his stomach and Will laughs, tickled by this in every meaning of the word.

“Fuck,” he manages, shaking fingers held steady when they pull at Hannibal’s hair. “Come on,” he insists with a grin. “I can take it.”

“Slow,” Hannibal counters, laughing when Will complains with a single note of protest. “Slow, let me show you.”

He kisses away the next sound Will makes, and instead of adding another finger, he curls the two that he has gently pressed within him already. For a moment, Will’s eyes open wide and he makes no sound at all, and then his entire body shudders, his knees draw up and his toes curl and Will draws his pleasure in red marks down Hannibal’s back.

“Holy shit,” he whimpers. “Holy shit.”

Hannibal kisses him and bites teasingly against his earlobe, almost purring his own pleasure against his friend. Will clutches him close, scrabbling heels and legs and fingernails and arms around Hannibal as if the sensation lifting him outside himself will cause him to float away entirely. Hell if he knows how Hannibal can make his body quake like this, riveted with pleasure so intense he shakes with it. Hell if Will could explain how it makes his cock so hard it almost hurts, leaking fluid copious and fertile across the flat plain of his belly.

He breathes Hannibal’s name because there’s nothing else he can work through the shuddering laughter that consumes him. The boy’s name has become a more sincere prayer than any Will has ever spoken otherwise, so he doesn’t fight it. He whispers it against Hannibal’s ear with every stroke of fingers inside his body, with every last gust of air that fills his lungs, with all the reverence that sacred name deserves.

“Hannibal,” Will gasps, when rubbing fingers spread virgin muscles aching wide. “Christ, Hannibal.”

“Breathe, Will,” Hannibal murmurs, adding a third finger, watching Will respond not at all, too overwhelmed and caught up in his own pleasure. There’s no pain here, no apprehensive dread nor fear. Not anymore. Not ever, ever again. Hannibal noses and nuzzles into his hair, breathing deep his scent both familiar and changed. He kisses and sucks marks against Will’s chest and throat, moans his own pleasure when Will clenches and squirms against him. And when he frees his hand, he meets Will’s eyes and parts his lips, suddenly as nervous as the first time they touched, silly boys who thought they were men, in the swamps together trying to make ends meet.

“I love you,” he tells him.

Will gutters out a sound, writhing free from within his throat. He slings his arms heavy around Hannibal’s shoulders, clutching him close. They can’t take this back now. They should have given it long ago.

“I love you,” Will whispers against his ear, “so fuckin’ much.”

The dollop of spit stroked slick around Hannibal’s cock clicks across Will’s nerves. His body clenches but a firm kiss quiets his uncertainty and he loses himself in the twisting lips of his friend. Will wants this from him. He wants this with him. He wants to give this to him and let Hannibal use his body for pleasure rather than as conduit for pain, and to savor the sting himself as sweetest penance.

And such a sting it is, Will’s lungs cease to work and he grits his teeth, bearing down with muscles he does not mean to clench and leaving stripes scratched hard against Hannibal’s back. Even when he lets loose his held breath, he can hardly take another, pushed so full his thighs quiver and his belly aches. It’s scarcely inside him, Hannibal’s cock - the thought makes Will groan - and Will knows how much more remains to take.

“Come on,” Will manages, laughing, swallowing hard against the tears of disbelief that darken his lashes. “Goddammit,” he groans, when Hannibal rocks deeper still.

Hannibal settles deeper in the bed, arms encircling Will’s head and gently stroking his hair as he trembles. Soft kisses pepper against Will’s stubbled cheek, down his sharp jaw, over the pulse that hammers in his throat, as thrust by shallow thrust, Hannibal pushes deeper into Will. He knows the tightness, he knows that it takes practice to relax in just the right way, to steady your breathing and let your body adjust as it needs to.

He knows that Will will learn, he will crave and ache for it, arch and twist for it, coy and lovely in bed. He cannot wait for the moment when he wakes with Will plastered against his back, whispering soft things to him as he did so long ago in their little house, when he wakes and Will nuzzles and tugs at him, wanting him, wanting this.

He has missed him. He has missed Will beyond words.

“Are you alright?” he whispers, smiling when Will nods, their foreheads rubbing together, with the motion. “Breathe for me.”

"God, you're big," Will sighs, laughing. The words fill Hannibal's cock fuller still; the twitching swell spills goosebumps across Will's skin and pulls his back from the bed with a keening moan. Pleasure interchanges smoothly with pain and back again, gradients like a sunrise chasing dark to light. Hannibal kisses his jaw, and Will grins. Hannibal kisses his chin, and Will drops a hand - fingernails pinked with the blood he didn’t mean to draw - over his face to hide his blushing laugh.

Will imagined, in later years, that such a thing as this might exist - penetration of a place not meant to be pierced, let alone in this way. He’d heard of such things muttered about in meeting nomads in passing. But in his mind it could be nothing less than an act of cruelest violence, a means of dominance to spread pain and terror. To think that it was that for Hannibal, gentle-hearted Hannibal, and for so long is unbearable enough that Will wraps his arms securely once more around his friend's neck to keep him close. Will’s body confesses what he can’t find words to speak.

Everything is alright.

Everything.

And it's a revelation to know - no, to feel - unfathomable bliss born from such black imaginings. Will stretches to feel the pressure inside himself, pushing against the same secret place inside that Hannibal rubbed with his fingers. His muscles yield, too tired now to tighten. His cock begins to fatten again, smeared glistening with his own slick pushed free.

"Is it good?" Will asks, thrusting his tongue between his lips to dampen and part them. Hannibal's balls press against Will's ass. The coarse hair at his groin tickles Will's own. He curls his bad hand through Hannibal's hair and bends his neck until their eyes meet and he can seek between them. "Is it good for you?"

“Yes,” Hannibal’s voice sounds broken, entirely, helpless and whimpering and soft. He shudders against Will as Will clenches around him, smiles up at him, laughs against his throat. “You feel incredible.”

Slowly, Hannibal pulls out, taking his time to be gentle, to watch Will’s response to the friction and the pressure, and when he pushes back in he adjusts the angle enough to stroke that spot within him that drove Will crazy when he fingered it. The sound Will makes is as much choked as it is loud, filtering to a guttural, needy, aching sound.

“Fuck.”

Hannibal laughs and pulls out again, starting a rhythm for them to fall into, slow and steady, deep and hard and enough to feel for days, for both of them. Will curses again as they sink together, tug apart, clench and push and bear down and groan relief. His legs curl higher over Hannibal’s narrow hips and his hands span downward over the scratches he’s left. Through slick sweat he follows the carved contours of muscle he’s watched for months, breath catching short to feel such power move beneath his fingers. Down to the divots at the small of his back and up over his ass, Will squeezes there and curls his legs and pushes, pulling, Hannibal deeper inside.

Will’s not let it be spoken, hardly let it be thought, but Hannibal in their years apart has become godlike, merciless at times, untouchably profound in his power and carriage. He is all at once the boy linen-limbed and lanky that Will tangled clumsy with in the marsh, and a man of untenable beauty. Every thrust, tempered with care but hardly caution, rivets Will’s pulse faster, his cock harder, presses wide tight muscles and pulls Will’s balls up tighter. He brings his chest up to feel the coarse scrub of Hannibal’s hair against his nipples, whimper jerking high. 

“Look at you,” Will whispers, allowing finally that rough reverence to filter thick into his voice.

Hannibal moans and ducks his head against Will, arching his back and pushing into him faster, letting his hands slide down sweat-slick sides to hold against Will’s hips. Still slight but stronger, powerful, marked by scars that have made him the man he is now. Hannibal would have been there for Will to make other ones, had they stayed together. They would have found ways to avoid the ones Will has now. Those scars both wear outwardly and those that are still healing unseen.

“You’re beautiful,” Hannibal tells him.

“I love you,” Will replies.

Faster and faster Hannibal moves, tilting his shoulders to add pressure to where Will wants it most, slowing once in a while to keep the pleasure constant and surprising. But he can feel Will is close, he can feel how he trembles, just the same as when he was a boy. Hannibal laughs, then, wondering how much is still the same between them that they feared irreparably changed.

“Come for me,” Hannibal whispers. “Make a mess of us both.”

“Hannibal -”

“Come on.”

The cut of his words spills a laugh from Will that sounds cousin to a sob. He wraps his arms around the man who joins their bodies together after too goddamn long apart. Hands over his shoulders, lips parted gasping and smearing into kisses across his shoulder, Will chokes down a breath and begs to be touched.

Hannibal’s fingers against his shaft are all it takes for Will’s body to stop. Movement and breath and everything but his pulse hold suspended as his seed unspools in slick ribbons of heat. High as his throat, spattered in Hannibal’s chest hair, dripping thick between their bellies, Will can do no more than clutch to his friend and groan his name and on that breath carry every prayer and curse he’s ever had for the man.

When Hannibal loses himself inside Will, he squirms all the more, the sensation strange and just on the right side of pleasant. He laughs and Hannibal laughs with him, kissing him again, on his lips, his cheeks, his jaw, his throat. He kisses and touches and holds Will near, weak with pleasure and relief, weak with love and strong with it simultaneously.

Whatever plans he had now involve another. Whatever stories he wanted to tell will have a second narrator. Everything he wanted to do he can now share.

“I’m shaking,” Hannibal admits, another laugh pushing through the words to hum against Will’s skin.

“No idea how I’m meant to work in the garden tomorrow,” Will mutters, his grin concealed against Hannibal’s cheek and felt all the same. He aches, muscles twitching in places he didn’t know they could. His ass is slippery, and when Will thinks of why he’s forced to bite down on his lip to bear back the moan that he nearly lets shamelessly forth.

“So do not,” Hannibal suggests. Will hums dissent and Hannibal tilts his head aside with a nuzzled kiss against his cheek.

“You gonna tell me about living rather than just surviving again?”

Hannibal smiles at this and starts to ease himself free of the warm, wet confines of Will’s body. His friend’s legs tighten to hold him there, arms sunk hard around his neck.

“We could,” Hannibal says. “We could now, with more ease than before.”

“Shut up,” snorts Will, smiling into a kiss tucked against the hollow of his throat.

They lay this way, catching their breaths and touching. Will noses against the soft skin that runs from Hannibal’s jaw up to just behind his ear, over and over, eyes closed and lips turned up in a smile. He sets his hands, soft, now, against Hannibal’s back where he had left scratches and marks for the warlord to touch and remember, and for his men to see and know him claimed just as much. He keeps his knees drawn up and his feet flat on the bed, and after a while he feels himself start to doze.

“I should clean you up first,” Hannibal murmurs, so low that Will more feels the words than hears them. “You will regret it, believe me, if we leave it until we wake.”

Will blinks sleepily awake at the words, drowsy and amused by every imagining as to how they might wake stuck together, fused whole. Then he imagines how it would hurt like hell to unstick themselves. And then Hannibal’s knowledge of this, specificities unspoken, threatens to waver his smile and so he steadies it for him as their eyes meet.

“I believe you,” he says, cupping his hands against Hannibal’s cheeks to bring him close into a kiss. He suckles the man’s bottom lip, caresses the top one with both of his own, and only then squints to make his body relax and free his friend.

The sudden emptiness, a width left wanting to be filled again, makes him groan anew. Hannibal’s kiss graces his brow before he stands on unsteady legs to make his way to the washroom. Will watches the stride, powerful and lazy like some great predator that somehow purrs beneath his hand. The same hand, then, that he runs between his legs to feel himself so stretched, Hannibal’s seed dripping thick over his fingertips.

It should be frightening, it should be unpleasant, but Will finds that he wants nothing else than to squeeze his thighs together more. He squirms onto his side, watching Hannibal shift in the room beyond, water splashing quietly as he washes his chest clean. When he returns, he holds a cloth folded against his palm, and with a grin and a knuckle between his teeth, Will shifts to open himself to be cleaned too.

“I didn’t think anything could feel as good as having your cock against mine,” Will laughs. Hannibal lifts his eyes with a sly look and strokes the cloth against Will’s softened length.

“I could show you a world of good things,” he promises.

“Could,” Will asks, “or will?”

“Will,” grants Hannibal, inclining his head. “With your permission.”

Will resists the impulse to tell him fuck permission and thinks better of it. Instead he just nods, shivering stiff as Hannibal slips the cloth between his legs. He waits, patient, and when Will relaxes, hot and cold meet against his sensitive skin and Will trembles. He presses a moan against his fingers through closed lips.

“Yes,” he says. “Please.”

Hannibal folds the cloth discreetly together to be washed and returns it from whence it came. Will’s eyes slip closed, absorbing the sound of his friend’s low hum, a song he’s never heard before but intricate and lovely, subtle in its textures. The bed shifts with the weight of Hannibal’s return and Will stirs a little, waking just enough to take a deep breath and stiffly turn towards him. They tangle their legs together; they adjust until their bodies nestle rightly together, two halves of the same solid whole.

“I love you,” Will tells him, because it bears repeating with every breath he takes.

Hannibal whispers the words in return against his hair, and draws the blanket over them both.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Will doesn’t argue that, but brings Hannibal’s fingertips against his mouth to kiss them and let him feel his smile. “Why’re you up so early?”_
> 
> _“Mornings are productive.”_
> 
> _“This one ain’t,” Will decides. “You’ve not got nowhere else you need to be.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Hannibal stirs first, accustomed to waking early to enjoy the day before anyone can bother him. He shifts and feels Will fuss against him, though he doesn’t wake. Will is lovely in sleep. Before he had allowed Hannibal to get close, he would watch him from the edge of the bed as he slept curled on the floor. In sleep, Will looks just like the boy with whom Hannibal had fallen in love. Just as young, just as carefree.

Now, Will presses his lips together and parts them again, sleepy and little and absolutely lovely.

His cheeks are pink. Hannibal knows that he will wince, just a little, when he wakes and moves and stretches, and that will be lovely too. Holding his breath, Hannibal leans closer to brush just a breath of a kiss against Will’s forehead, smiling when it doesn’t yet stir him.

With permission given now for nearness, Hannibal takes him in from a vantage point he never again imagined he’d reach. Close enough to see how his lashes lay long against his cheek, close enough to survey the freckles just a shade heavier than the ruddy bronze tan that darkens his cheeks. He sees above his brow, beneath his hair, the hair-thin white line of a scar. A wiry willow branch snapped back when Will tried to bend it, and lashed a stripe of blood and bountiful oaths from him.

Hannibal kisses it now as he did then, and just the same, hushes him when he squirms.

They are both impatient, seen clearly now in the men they’ve become. Demanding and relentless, stubborn to a fault. But then, they had nothing but kindness for the other, and time to allow the other’s sundry angsts to settle. Always, but for the last few months, they’ve been gentler with the other than themselves or anyone else. Hannibal cannot help but wonder now how they will shape the other with their presence, now that nubile limbs and youthful hearts have hardened.

Will pulls an arm up between them, and shoves his head beneath Hannibal’s chin, nuzzling close. In his sleep his fingers unfurl against the thick pelt of hair for which he’s always praised his friend, coarser now, and thicker too. Hannibal turns his head enough to rest his cheek against Will’s hair, lips parting for a wayward curl to slip smooth across his mouth.

Nothing more than touches and breath, nothing more than feeling the other close, alive, heavy against them. How many times has Hannibal thought of this? How many times had he woken in this bed against a body he hated, and wished, hoped, with all his heart, that that body would be Will’s someday. Loved and wanted. Needed and ached for. How he loves him.

“Sleep,” he whispers, voice rough and low. “It’s early yet.”

“I was until you started up,” mutters Will, words dragged together in a slurried, sleepy drawl.

It’s all Hannibal can do not to squeeze him, mash their mouths together, lay atop him or drag Will onto himself and tell him he loves him until there’s no breath left in his body. He refrains. Nothing more than another kiss against his forehead, certain this time to catch another silken strand of hair against his lips.

Hannibal waits. This is a game he knows well, and not until Will’s fingers unfurl and he snores in a deep breath to settle does Hannibal dare move again. Just relaxing his hand, enough to trace the notches of Will’s spine with fingertips so light there’s scarcely contact at all, and then upward. Across his shoulder and down the back of his arm, firm muscles made soft now in his sleep.

How capable he was, even then, using wiry strength and stubborn grit to drag Hannibal out of the swamp that claimed him. How capable he is now, to pull Hannibal back from far greater and more dangerous depths than that.

“Will you quit?” Will snorts, twitching suddenly away from the tickling touch and wriggles as if to free himself and turn his back to Hannibal. There’s a smile caught in the corner of his mouth, and the eye he squints open. “Christ, you’re annoying,” he murmurs. He grins before he can stop himself.

“I love you in the mornings,” Hannibal tells him and Will snorts again.

“Clingy bastard,” he mutters, stretching a little, cursing at the unusual ache in his ass. Then he does turn his back to Hannibal, and squirms back against him so they fit like sardines. Hannibal lifts an arm to wrap around him and Will immediately tugs it around himself, slipping his fingers between Hannibal’s to hold him close.

“Grumpy shit,” Hannibal dubs him fondly.

Will doesn’t argue that, but brings Hannibal’s fingertips against his mouth to kiss them and let him feel his smile. “Why’re you up so early?”

“Mornings are productive.”

“This one ain’t,” Will decides. “You’ve not got nowhere else you need to be.”

Hannibal doesn’t argue that. He follows the warm curve of Will’s shoulder with lazy kisses, skin soft and body lax. There’s nowhere else he needs to be. Nowhere else he wants to be. When Will brings Hannibal’s hand back to his chest, Hannibal rests his thumb above his heart, and the slow drumming rhythm feels like home.

But for his comfort, his warmth, the drowsiness that curls around them like a blanket, Will does not yet settle to sleep again. Instead, he turns Hannibal’s hand so that they’re palm to palm, fingers matched. His hands were startlingly soft when they first shook, and it took Will seeing the first bloody callouses birthed at the bases of his fingers to realize how unaccustomed they were to work. They bear now upon them all manner of marking, hardened skin and scars and knuckles turned slightly aside from bearing the brunt of brutality down upon others and still, still, they are the same gentle hands Will knew in youth.

Tools are what men make of them. A knife used to kill might just as soon be used to gather food. A hammer used to beat could as readily be used to build. Hannibal’s hands are the same. Their bodies, the same. And Will faults not the tools used for ill in the hands of men who meant wrongdoing, now that he has them in the protection of his grasp again.

Will kisses his knuckles. He kisses his scars. He kisses the thumb that lifts to stroke his lips and takes the tip between in a gentle suckle.

As though reading his mind, Hannibal laments, “They aren't soft anymore.”

“I like how they are,” Will assures him, seeking another sucking kiss against Hannibal’s thumb. He draws his lips over the damaged knuckles again and wriggles more impatiently back against Hannibal’s chest. “And that,” he adds. “I very much like that.”

“You’ve grown none,” Hannibal points out, teasing against Will’s hairless chest, finding only a few hairs against the dark little nipples he plans to torment with relish later.

“Bullshit,” Will complains, not in protest but in general dismay towards the truth of this observation. He looks down his chest, woefully smooth, and glides Hannibal’s hand down to trail of hair lower on his belly. “Here, though,” he says. “This got a little more -”

“Thick, yes.”

Will grins abashed at the way his friend purrs that word against him, rubbing his cheek against the flat pillow they share. As Hannibal pays due attention to the dark hair trickling downward, Will splays his fingers across Hannibal’s wrist. He finds a stretch of skin rubbed unnaturally smooth, scar tissue laid flat and hairless. The sudden tightness in his stomach eases with another stroke of Hannibal’s fingers.

Hannibal doesn’t tell him about the manacles, stripping his skin raw as he tried to pull free of them. He needn’t for Will to know. Somehow, Will always knows.

Turning beneath Hannibal’s arm, Will wincing twists to face him again, and run his hands properly through the hair on Hannibal’s chest. “Damn you,” he laughs, envious and adoring. “No wonder I didn’t grow any, you took it all.”

“I’m awful,” Hannibal admits with a sigh.

Will grins and lifts a brow. “Not sorry?”

“Not sorry. I have no remorse.” Hannibal keeps his expression clear but Will can read the grin in his eyes, and smiles at him first, nose wrinkling as he coaxes Hannibal to smile back.

He doesn’t, trained in the art of put-upon indifference. But he does tweak Will’s nose gently, and kisses it after. He draws his wide hand down over Will’s chest and rubs his thumb across a nipple, humming apparent surprise when Will tenses in pleasure from the touch.

“It makes you much more sensitive, though,” he tells Will, smiling now in lazy damn near predatory pleasure. “Right here.”

Will relaxes from the shiver that pulled his whole body to attention, down to his toes that ease from their pleasured curl. With a squint, he bends his fingers in Hannibal’s hair and strokes downward, fingernails grazing a nipple. Hannibal’s belly tightens but he yields no more than that, expression positively somber, and Will snorts when he laughs.

“Stubborn,” he praises him, seeking across familiar features until he finds a scar notched subtle on Hannibal’s chin. To this, Will raises a fingertip, kissing beside it in quiet questioning.

Hannibal hums and arches his neck like a cat, eyes hooding but still watching Will.

“Believe it or not,” he says. “I stepped on a crusted old rake, when I first fixed up the garden.”

Will blinks, then snorts, then turns his giggles against Hannibal’s chest. Hannibal draws his knuckles up and down Will’s back in gentle adoration. It was his most viciously bloody and entirely cruelty-free injury. It delights Hannibal that it delights Will.

“I always took it as a reprimand sent to me by you for messing up your grid lines in the mud,” he adds softly.

Will’s smile softens even as his pleasure swells. He kisses the scar again, accepting this strange apology with warm delight. “I’d say it was God looking after his own,” Will mutters, “but I reckon that would be something of a hyperbole at this point.”

“A hyperbole,” Hannibal echoes, brow raised.

“I read some books,” shrugs Will, attempting nonchalance but delightfully smug. “I found some and I read them.”

Hannibal doesn’t correct his pronunciation. What does it matter in this world whether the E is long or silent? In this space that they reclaim for themselves kiss by kiss and touch by touch, as once they reclaimed inches of wetland to tame it into their own liking, who’s to say they can’t rewrite these rules too?

“Have to keep up with you somehow,” Will says. Hannibal kisses his blush, stroking over his freckles with his thumb to mark the path his lips follow. Smile widening, Will tucks an arm under Hannibal’s and curls a hand over his shoulder. “Your way of telling me to live, not just survive.”

“You were always my life and survival,” Hannibal tells Will. He needn’t to go into detail for Will to understand. The past is passed and done. Now they are here. Now they can begin and rebuild and truly become.

Beyond a warlord.

Beyond a wanderer.

Beyond vindictiveness and anger.

Slowly, they will live and survive together.

“Shall we warm water for a bath?” Hannibal asks, eyes narrowing in pleasure as Will grins. “Soak in it ‘til our heart’s content and our skin prunes and grows entirely unattractive?”

“Ain’t done with you here yet,” Will murmurs, coiling a leg over Hannibal’s hip to hold him close. Spreading a hand along his cheek, Will grazes his fingertips along the stiff scruff, speckled with spots of grey. Rather than appearing as a ruination of youth, it instead gives him a bearing that seems damn near regal. Will pulls a kiss against the stiff hairs and shivers as they rasp against his lips.

It’s little wonder the men outside their door revere and fear him so. He’s from another time, held encapsulated against the relentless storm that’s weathered everyone on the outside. Noble as any king in his carriage, and untouched in compare to the rough marks others wear on their skin. Distant and proud and strange.

“That tickles,” he notes, and Will snorts a laugh against his cheek. Accepting this invitation, and challenged by the stoic tone with which Hannibal yields it, Will slips a hand up Hannibal’s side. Teasing over ribs, he seeks out the wiry hair beneath his arms and brushes across it. Hannibal’s lips twitch, but nothing more.

Will squints.

But no sooner does he lift his hand to attempt again than Will finds himself pinned to his back and held fast. Sputtering loud unwieldy laughter as one wrist is caught, and the other snared mid-swing, Will arches from the bed against the heavy body atop him and struggles to catch his breath. One hand holding him down, the other upraised, Hannibal arches a brow.

“Don’t,” Will warns him, toes curling and grin tilted crooked in anticipation. “Don’t you fuckin’ -”

Hannibal merely lowers his hand to pet against Will as one would a cat. Over his face and down his neck, against his chest, before his fingers curl at Will’s sides and the sound he makes pierces in surprise and protest and pleasure all.

Hannibal continues his meticulous tickling, seeming to expend no energy at all in holding Will down. Only when Will’s breath hitches and his wriggling becomes impossible to control does Hannibal stop. He kisses Will as deeply as he can, with him trying to catch his breath, and delights in sucking against his pulse when Will turns his head away. His hummed complaint vibrates against Hannibal's lips.

"Not fair," he mutters.

"No?"

"No. You're bigger than me."

"Not by much."

Will crooks a brow at this but his eyes close as another suckled kiss strokes across his throat. Hannibal's tongue flattens, licking darkening skin between his lips again. With a shiver, Will arches up and frees a hand to slide between them. He fans his fingers over Hannibal's cock, mostly soft, and gently, pointedly tugs against his foreskin.

"By much," Will grins. "Do you still like this?"

Hannibal shudders and arches his back, legs immediately spreading in pleasure. His toes curl and he settles again. It has been years since someone has touched him this way - not since Will. No one else has even thought to bring Hannibal pleasure instead of merely watching him take pain.

“Yes,” he sighs.

Will's eyes hood, watching warmth spread across Hannibal's cheeks. His lips part, pinker than before, and every tender tug makes him draw a breath. Neither have the energy so early to commit to more than touching, but neither could want for anything else after so long apart. Will presses the delicate skin between the pads of his fingers, rolling it lightly back and forth before stretching it again, a little more.

"Would you let me put my mouth on it?" Will asks, not out of urgency, but out of curiosity and desire to hear his friend consent. How strange that it should be a luxury. "Feel how soft it is on my tongue. Suck it like I do your fingers." Will bites his bottom lip and releases it, cheeks flooding scarlet at his own imaginings. "Would that feel good?"

Hannibal makes another of those helpless breathy sounds. His fingers curl tight in the blankets and release again, over and over. He rocks into Will’s hands, entirely content to give himself over to his friend and his careful fingers, his petal-soft lips.

“I’ve never...” He swallows hard and shivers again, embarrassed by his lack of experience in something so gentle, something meant to make one feel good. “I trust you,” Hannibal tells him.

Will discovered this too in his roadside studies, like the word _hyperbole_ and all the other things added to his worldly knowledge. It wasn’t a book - it was a magazine, dried out and preserved on a shelf in a little store that offered little more than strange sun-cracked plastic and decaying silicon, scandalous images on the wall, and enough leather not yet ruined that he could reinforce some of his clothes. But the magazine was not like the rest, with women displayed like so much meat, that filled Will with shame to look upon. The magazine was men touching men, kissing and fondling them. He made it only so far as this act - thereafter imagined in great detail - before his shaking hands bade him put it back.

His hands don’t shake now, though. They are steady and eager, one circling Hannibal’s shaft and the other tugging that soft slip of extra skin even as his friend’s cock swells and the skin becomes smaller around it.

“If you don’t like it, I’ll stop,” Will promises.

“If you don’t like it, I want you to stop,” Hannibal tells him, before allowing himself to be turned to his back. Blankets loop around their bodies as they roll, and Will releases Hannibal’s cock only to frame his ribs and kiss the center of his chest. Now he trembles a little, uncertain and assured all at once.

Hannibal licks his lips and swallows, watching Will kiss against him. His stomach, lower still to the thatch of hair that leads in a thick trail down between his legs. His cock twitches, and Hannibal watches Will bite his lip before kissing against the V of his hips.

The smell is musky and masculine, and Will breathes deep, as much to remember, to know this smell as well as he does his own, as to hear Hannibal take a deep breath and hold it.

They are boys again, right then. Learning to touch each other for the first time.

Will’s throat clicks and his lips part, studying this part of his friend from so near. The skin that’s strong enough to stretch and so sensitive that Hannibal’s whole body responds to it being touched is so thin that Will can see the vessels beneath, dark and full with blood. He smells like their seed spilled the night before. He smells like the coarse soap he used to wash up after. And when Will presses a kiss against the thickest vein that runs beneath, he tastes all that and more.

Hannibal’s cock twitches as he makes a strangled sound. Will takes it in his hand and kisses again, the same way he’d kiss any part of him, but this even more thrilling for how debauched it seems. He licks the taste of sweat from it, salty against his tongue. He kisses up the musky familiarity that he knows but here finds amplified.

A curious nuzzle tilts downward, and watching upward, Will kisses the wrinkled skin of his balls, too.

Hannibal can barely keep his eyes open. This feels good, strange, wonderful, he wants more but he refuses to ask for it. He will take anything Will offers him, he will not force any of his own wants on him. The very thought that he is down there now, kissing and touching and tasting him makes Hannibal’s back arch, his voice give in a low and needy moan.

Will kisses back up against him, nosing in the wiry hair, parting his lips wider to suck softly against the sensitive skin he knows so intimately by touch. Hannibal jerks in surprise and Will sits back, eyes wide. 

“Did I hurt you?”

“No,” Hannibal murmurs. “No, nothing like that. Nothing like - please do it again.”

Will watches him closely, all too aware of the bravery Hannibal can muster when he’s in pain or afraid, and how quickly he can shutter it from his features. Turning his head aside, Will again wraps his mouth around Hannibal’s shaft, and suckles. Hannibal’s stilted gasp and flattened stomach, parted lips and hooded eyes, leave little question as to whether Will is doing him any harm.

He moves upward, one palm against Hannibal’s hip and the other hand wrapped around his cock. Upward, around the swell at the top and upward, until he reaches the puckered skin gathered wrinkled and glossy-wet at the tip. Hesitant only for a heartbeat, Will kisses here too, and suckles a little, and hums at the warmth that leaks against his tongue.

Both of Hannibal’s hands come up to press to his face, as much to muffle the sounds he makes as to stop himself from shoving them into Will’s hair and pulling him closer. He wants more. He needs more. To feel the heat of Will’s lips against his cock, to feel his mouth take him in, swallow him down, _moan_ -

“Don’t stop, don’t ever stop,” Hannibal mumbles, harsh, drawing up his knees and spreading them for Will to settle more comfortably, and closer. “You feel amazing.”

“More?” Will asks, and as Hannibal glances down, the sight of Will’s lips made slick and joined to his cock by a gossamer strand of spit nearly undoes him entirely.

“Please,” Hannibal laughs.

He bears down on the pit of his stomach as Will lowers his head, soft curls flopping into his face. He holds Hannibal’s cock upright and spreads his lips around it, tongue curled beneath and pressing up where the flared head curves inward. Will adjusts his knees beneath him, spread wide, cock dangling between his thighs. He is radiant, head bowed and lips bent to a ring, cheeks ruddy and body arched.

This is a gift given, rather than a claim taken. An exploration shared by both with uncertain eagerness and trembling desire. Both willing to learn, both wanting to know what their bodies can do together that they can do with no one else.

Will hollows his cheeks and sucks, tongue drawn in a long lick within his mouth over the soft skin that encases Hannibal’s cock.

Hannibal finally allows a hand to drop down to curl in Will’s hair, not to force but to feel the way his head ducks and bobs against Hannibal's cock. The way his body tenses as he bows lower, firming suddenly when he goes too deep, then relaxing again. The way his whole body engages in this strange devotion, new to both of them as now everything seems again.

He won't last long. He can feel himself getting closer and closer to climax. Will doesn’t raise his eyes and for that Hannibal is grateful - he wouldn't last if he did.

“God, I’ve thought of you so often,” Hannibal whispers. “Early mornings and late nights and cold winter days - oh -”

His voices hitches when Will hums, so Will does it again. Pouring out his acknowledgment and assent of their adoration, ceaseless, no matter how far-flung they were, Will slowly, carefully lowers himself until the tip of Hannibal's cock touches the back of his throat. He tightens his stomach when it makes him choke on reflex, drawing away just as languidly and leaving a smear of spit shining on his shaft as he does.

He stops at the head, suckling harder, overwhelmed by the intoxicating odor of distilled masculinity concentrated between Hannibal's legs. It would be unpleasant, any stronger. It would be unpleasant were it anyone else. But the scent of Hannibal, Hannibal's essence itself, funnels Will's pulse faster and as he sucks, noisy and wet-lipped, he reaches between his legs to stroke.

Every morning. Every night. Every hour of every day.

His jaw aches, but he doesn't stop.

Hannibal tries to warn him with words and tugged curls, but he doesn't stop.

Will feels Hannibal's cock swell as his friend curses. He splits his lips and runs his tongue along his dick, pulling his own with soft slaps of skin, and lowers his lips again just as the first hot burst jettisons against his cheek.

It should be revolting. It should be filthy and unwelcome but instead Will feels claimed in the best and most delicious way. He feels worthy - worthy of being this man’s friend, and calling this man his.

“Will,” Hannibal grunts, reaching for him to move closer, reaching to wipe the mess from his face and kiss him deep as Will continues to stroke himself, panting and whimpering against Hannibal’s cheek. “Beautiful, brave boy,” Hannibal praises him. “Come for me.”

Will keens high and sharp at the words, and though he tries to warn Hannibal that it’s on his mouth, Hannibal kisses him even harder. Sucking his bottom lip, licking his tongue, they smear their pleasure together in sticky strands. A firm nuzzle against his cheek, Hannibal’s hands against his face, he beseeches Will again to come for him and Will’s shoulders curve as his cock spurts thick against Hannibal’s belly.

Half atop him, half beside, Will can do no more than moan loud and shameless, rutting in aimless thrusts until his body empties itself. A laugh is the first sound he makes when he can catch his breath again, draped in countless kisses and whispers of praise. He wraps his arms around Hannibal’s neck and pulls him close, their heads turned together and mouths tucked against the other’s throat.

“Weren’t so bad,” Will whispers, grinning wide when Hannibal laughs helplessly.

They lay together and sleep long enough to hear the church awaken around them. Grunts and grumbling, the shuffling of feet against wooden floors and stone steps. Will sighs against Hannibal and presses closer. So it is that their little bubble is burst by reality, but hardly forgotten. Hannibal draws a hand through Will’s curls and tugs them before letting them go.

“Bath?”

“Please.”

Hannibal knows not what the day will bring, he rarely does. They have no need to go raiding, they are stocked well for the coming winter. But he knows his men grow impatient and irritable, like animals trapped in a too-small space, one atop the other. He will have to find them an outlet, direct them to an empty settlement and a newly established one, and hope the people they find there have the sense to hide.

He tenses beneath Will and turns away from him, slipping his feet to the floor to stand and make his way to their little bathroom. It is harder to shake, now, the warmth that comes with waking and thinking of Will beside him when he lays just there, buried sleepily in his blankets. It is harder to kill the kindness that he must bear down upon to appear ruthless once more to his men.

He begins the slow and steady work of warming water and filling the bath, alternating pots to be poured and heated. Hannibal reminds himself of being bent, terrified, upon the dais and taken in front of countless men watching rapt and cheering. He reminds himself of the blows laid bruising against his skin so knotted black he could not sleep until they eased. Pinned beneath a sweaty, horrid body, smothered under filthy hands, used and passed and used and passed and treated more savagely still when he protested too much or not enough.

His heart clenches smaller, and he splashes water against his skin to wash away the seed stuck to him. A look levelled on himself in the mirror finds his jawline taut and heart steadied by the hate he needs to replace the guilt swelling in him. He had, before Will - before the last day - cordoned his mind into separate places, distinct and divided from the rest. It is only now that they begin to blur. Only now that his sins seem so transparent, overlaid upon the terror he guides others to wreak.

He tries to build the wall again, at least a few bricks higher, just enough.

“Your bath is ready,” he says.

Will makes a fussy, pleased and sleepy noise from the other room. “Ain’t you -”

“Entirely yours for now. Tonight, perhaps, we’ll share another.”

“Tonight?” Will asks, pushing up to sit on his hip with a grimace.

“When I return.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“You ain’t supposed to be here,” Will tells him, dismayed by how weak his voice suddenly sounds and how intensely his bad wrist aches from the mere presence of this man. This man who was kinder to his friend than most. This man who destroyed everything they had and Hannibal still defends._
> 
> _“Never did have much talent for hospitality, did you?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Will stands at the steps of the church and watches him go. Garbed in patched flannel worn tender with age, held together across his chest by folded arms, and rugged jeans below, the sun-hot marble warms his bare feet but does little to ease the chill that shivers him. Hannibal is resplendent in his horrors, as beautiful as ever but suddenly so vast, so incomprehensible in his breadth that Will can scarcely breathe for it.

Thick hides layer into pauldrons borne wide on strong shoulders. A breastplate of stiff leather interwoven over sheets of metal to guard his chest. Everywhere, patches of reinforcement, straps around his hands to keep his knuckles protected and wrists steady, tall boots that dig deep against the dry earth, slashes of blood-black paint gored across his features and ash run white through his hair.

As he gives his orders to the bands of raiders howling anticipation, he does not look back to Will. For that, Will is grateful. If he did, he might see right through Will to his skittish heart, spasming fear of what his friend does and what penance might come in the form of a swift knife or errant bullet. If he did, he might see how hard Will is fighting not to interrupt him and beg him to stop this.

And what right has Will for that? What right, when he is now complicit in sharing the spoils of these savage misdeeds, when he now sleeps in a stolen bed and someone else’s clothes and a sacred space turned blasphemous? No right. None. No justification for any of this but that Hannibal is his friend.

As they depart in an upswell of dust and clattering voices and booming feet, Will returns to the relative quiet of the church. There are still men here, those tasked with guarding the place or too injured to join their brethren. They hiss and crackle in place of their fires, now extinguished, as Will continues past.

He doesn’t raise his chin proudly, he doesn’t make a sound back. He holds his arms crossed and his hands folded against the soft fabric of his shirt, and takes care to avoid the sharp or filthy things on the ground before him. Several steps from the door to Hannibal’s room, Will pauses, considers, and draws forth the key around his neck to go to the garden instead. He has no need to be there but for his own desire for solitude and quiet. He isn’t hungry. He doesn’t need more rest. He’s simply empty, like a gored squash.

He needs as much to be alone with his thoughts as to hide far far away from them.

The key turns with a familiar click and a welcome sticking when Will tries to pull it free from the lock once picked by a boy desperate for a life outside of this stone prison. Will presses the key against his lips, to feel the notches and bends of it, and passes through, closing the door deliberately behind himself.

It's quiet here, as it always is, and warm enough to not have Will retreat inside for a sweater or coat or blanket. He moves on tiptoes along the little tiled paths built between the garden boxes and checks for insects on the leaves.

“Yer really much prettier now you've grown.” The voice is entirely unwelcome and Will tenses, turning to seek the source of it. “Though Lord almighty, you still look like that scrawny little thing I pulled bare from the mud house up on the swamps.”

Will doesn’t reach for his knife, bound snug against his leg, but the weight of it is sudden stark comfort as he levels a look on Kincaid, lips slick with persimmon. The man drags the back of his hand across his mouth and ambles closer.

“You ain’t supposed to be here,” Will tells him, dismayed by how weak his voice suddenly sounds and how intensely his bad wrist aches from the mere presence of this man. This man who was kinder to his friend than most. This man who destroyed everything they had and Hannibal still defends.

“Never did have much talent for hospitality, did you?”

“Not when bastards like you go barging where they don’t belong.”

“Don’t belong?” Kincaid laughs, dropping the fruit half-eaten to the earth and brushing the juices off between his palms. “Sweetheart…”

“Don’t.”

“Sweetheart,” he says again, lips curling over bared teeth, the word hissed. “D’you have any idea how long I kept hold of the warlord? How much I had to stop myself fucking him raw like everyone else? I’m the one who dragged him out from beneath them when he couldn’t move. I’m the one made sure he ate when he needed, whether he wanted it or not. And you come along and think you’ve got more claim to him than I do.”

“For his sake, then,” Will says, fisting his hands at his sides, “I’d suggest you move along. He don’t want you dead but I can’t claim to share his compunctions about the idea.”

Kincaid snorts and shakes his head. He is older than when Will first saw him, of course, but he shows it more than most. Greying hair and scars that line his face, some smooth others jagged and cruel. Fingernails perhaps, or knives. Will swallows.

“You’re a brave thing, lad, you were then too. But you need to learn to be smart as well.”

“I’m smart enough,” Will whispers.

“You’re blinded by youthful need for revenge is what you are,” Kincaid laughs, a harsh barking sound. “Thinking you're safe and worry-free because you have the master’s bed to crawl into. Consider, boy, that he ain't here. Not to talk you down or to change my mind. Now what’ll you do?”

Will wants to answer with a curse and a threat, but it’s precisely what the man wants and everything that Will has spent the morning mourning as the core construct of their place in the world. He’s not been harmed by more than the man’s presence - though that’s an offence in itself, he allows. He will not beget violence in this place that’s meant for peace, no matter how sincerely his bowels tremble with vicious animal desire to see Kincaid dead.

“I’m gonna keep working,” Will says. “And you’re gonna go back inside.”

“Or what?” Kincaid presses, with a sneer and a step closer.

“Or I’ll tell him you were out here, and we’ll let the warlord sort you out.”

With this threat, wielding power his only by proxy, Will steps past the man to scoop up the fruit he’s dropped and bring it to the compost. He no sooner bends than he’s snared by the waist and dragged back, filthy fingers smeared across his mouth too tight for him to bite. Will makes a sound, instinctive, and no one hears it but themselves and the birds above.

“Years, sweetheart, years watching that boy grow and seeing the mess he was made into by the man who claimed him. Did he tell you? Did he tell you the things he had done to him for that man’s sick thrills?”

Will squirms, trying to get free. Drawing his legs up and kicking them out, trying to unbalance Kincaid enough for him to drop Will to the ground again.

“I was the one wiping his tears up when he lay in a filthy bloody pile against that floor. I was the one he should have come to when it was over, but he's a proud bastard, our Hannibal, he refuses to be seen as helpless, so he stalked on alone.”

Kincaid presses Will up against one of the rough surrounding walls and whispers hot words against his ear as Will’s heart hammers and he panics, trapped between the one man he hates the most and an unyielding brick.

“I deserved that boy in my bed,” Kincaid hisses. “I deserved his voice pulling tight in pleasure. You were a forgotten thing by then, you know. He'd given up hope of seeing you alive and then there you _fucking_ were.”

Will throws his weight backwards but despite his strength regained, his power pales in compare to the man who’s spent a brutal lifetime honing it. He’s shoved harder, cheekbone scraped against coarse brick, and Kincaid’s fingers rise just enough to smother beneath his nose in turn. Will coils away from the cock stabbing stiff against his ass, and for his effort, Kincaid rubs it harder.

“So maybe I get you instead, then,” he supposes. “Since I don’t get him what was rightfully mine and I should’ve fucked you back in the swamp years ago, pretty thing.” Will surges at the word and another hard smack pins him flat against the wall, so tight he can hardly breathe, let alone slip to his knees or twist or turn. “S’only fair, innit? My fuckin’ right to do now what I should’ve then.”

Will’s nails split against the brick, tearing bloody as he drags down a hand slowly, slowly, so that Kincaid doesn’t notice in the struggle where he’s reaching. He makes a sound that rips a groan from Kincaid, a growl shuddering into a laugh.

“There you go, sweetheart. Sing for me like you do for him.”

Will closes his eyes tight and tries to keep his breathing steady as a hand reaches down to work open his pants, Kincaid’s body heavy enough to hold him still. Will makes another sound and Kincaid praises him with a curse purred against his neck.

Closer and closer Will’s hand reaches, he can scrape the leather handle with the tips of his fingers. He sobs when he's bared, mumbling against the hand that silences him that Hannibal will never forgive him if he does this, that if he wants into his good graces he need only ask rather than do harm. Stretching further still, pants caught around his thighs, Will grasps the handle, tears squeezing past the corners of his eyes as he feels Kincaid - now bare - shove against him again.

“God, you’re fuckin’ tight,” he groans, probing Will with relentless pushing as Will clenches hard against entry. “Pretty little thing, ain’t the warlord been fucking you right?”

The first strip of leather slips free. The second, as Kincaid curses his frustration. He spits into his hand and the movement yields enough space for Will to turn, blade drawn and hand fisted in the man’s hair. Shouting, wordless and animalistic, Will shoves Kincaid back against the wall and juts the blade against his throat.

He brings up his pants with the other hand and when Kincaid so much as lifts his hands, Will nearly cuts him open.

“Yes,” Will hisses. “He has.”

For a moment neither move; Will with his teeth bared and eyes narrowed and righteous anger pulsing through him, and Kincaid steadying his breath as a thin line of blood slicks from the edge of the blade held against him down into his shirt.

“Looks like you did manage to get clever in yer time living it rough,” he murmurs, watching Will’s lip twitch in fury. “You gonna kill me, boyle? He’d never forgive ya, if ya did.”

Will’s anger lessens to something far more sinuous. A slight smile appears, as he sets his hand to Kincaid’s throat in place of the blade and lowers the knife between them instead. Tucked just underneath the man’s bared balls, Kincaid spits a curse and rises to his toes, trembling as Will holds him there.

“When I saw that you were still here,” Will whispers, “I was livid. He told me why he kept you alive but when I told him I’d no such reason myself, he didn’t argue. And when I asked if he’d stop me from killing you where you fuckin’ stand, do you know what he said then?”

Kincaid’s throat jerks under Will’s hand as he swallows.

“‘No’,” Will tells him. “No, he said. He wouldn’t stop me. So whatever you think he owes you, just remember that the only reason you’re walkin’ out of this garden right now with your pecker is because _I_ allowed it.”

Kincaid watches the angry beautiful thing before him, watches the narrowing of pale blue eyes, the way his lips are red and smeared with the muck from Kincaid’s fingers where they held him. They will bruise, those marks, just a little. There is a scratch left across his cheek from the brick. That can be his victory, if nothing else. Without a word, the man inclines his head, lifting his eyes in as submissive a gesture as he can manage.

“I’ll remember,” he offers.

Will holds him there a moment more. His blood burns hot, panic still slamming his heart against his ribs. It would be so simple now to make sure this animal hurts no one, ever again. He’d hardly even feel the cut before shock took him and bloodloss finished the job. Will could toss his cock into the compost bin in place of the persimmon he wasted and know that no more would be the men who dragged them from their Eden long ago.

Bracing with a flinch of muscle in such a way that Kincaid shuts his eyes and gasps, Will lets him go all at once. He steps back as Kincaid stumbles and falls to his knees, dragging up his pants with shaking hands and watching balefully the man before him.

“Are you gonna tell him?”

“I should,” Will says with a shrug, wiping the blood from his blade with a thumb, and smearing it against his pants to keep masked the shaking that starts to pulse cold through his veins. “And I’m content to leave it as such so long as we have an understanding that you’re never to lay hand on me nor him again.”

Kincaid drags himself upward and nods again, once. No more need be said than that, as he turns to go, back to the door and eyes on Will, unwilling at least to give him the pleasure of seeing him slink away like a wounded animal.

“Kincaid,” Will calls out. He stops with his hand on the door. “You ever call me pretty again? I’ll skin it while it’s still attached.”

The man snorts, not out of disbelief, but out of something like respect for the kid and his bravery. He licks his lips.

“Prick,” he says softly, turning to open the door and see himself out.

Will stands a moment more, knife clenched in his hand, other hand curled into a fist at his side, before he takes the few quick steps necessary to reach the door and lock it fast. He’s shaking. He feels sick and he knows he will have nothing for his stomach to heave up but bile and water if he’s ill now. He presses the back of his wrist against his mouth and closes his eyes and shakes harder.

With a small sound, like an animal in pain, a young thing fallen from its nest and confused and cold and terrified, Will turns his back to the door and slips down it. His knife drops to the ground and and he gathers his knees up against his chest, close as he can. If he’d not strapped his blade to his leg that morning, if he’d not moved fast enough, if Kincaid had seen him go for it...

His stomach heaves and Will unfurls enough to tilt and spill his guts against the ground. There’s blood where his fingernails split against brick, his cheek is slick with fluid from the scrape. It could be worse, he tells himself. It could be so much worse.

And yet his pain builds, echoing outward. It was worse, for Hannibal, for years this was his life. Had he not become the monster Will titled him when first they found the other, once thought unreachable, it would have continued.

Alone now, but for the birds and the little animals that make this garden their home, Will sobs until his body aches. When finally he returns inside, it’s with ten quick steps to the warlord’s chambers and eyes straight-ahead, towards no one and nothing. He checks that the door is locked and the room empty, over and over, before peeling free from filthy clothes to bathe cold and try to wash the filth away.

He has emptied the bath a second time, shaking from the impact of the cold water against his skin, when he hears the cheers erupt in the church proper at the return of the raiding parties. Will steps into the tub again and with shaking hands lifts the next bucket of water over his head to see if this, at last, will make him feel clean.

It doesn’t.

Nothing does.

He stands this way, trembling and cold, bucket empty at the bottom of the tub, as the door opens and closes again, as the familiar presence of Hannibal fills the room. Will doesn’t move. He doesn’t call out to him, he doesn’t do anything. He gasps quietly at the feeling of a hot palm against cold skin, and only raises his eyes when Hannibal says his name.

“Who hurt you?” he asks, voice rough from yelling to his men, as much displeasure as encouragement. “Will?”

Will searches across his face, for a moment his own discomfort forgotten in relief and concern for his friend. His paint has smudged. Dust darkens his hair and clothes and skin in the same withered brown tone. But he does not stand as if he’s injured. There are no fine lines of pain drawn across his features. Will nods, just nods.

He’s okay.

He’s back and he’s alright.

And then renewed tears surge up enough to choke guttural in his throat. Will tilts his eyes upward, away, past Hannibal to keep them dry, but as he starts to shake Hannibal circles an arm around his waist and brings him close. Only then, with his face hidden against hard leather, does Will softly sob.

“I’m sorry,” he says, voice hitching nearly too short to speak. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. It should’ve been me. It shouldn’t have been neither of us, Hannibal…”

“Breathe,” Hannibal whispers, bringing a hand up to stroke over Will’s dripping cold hair. “You’re freezing, Will.” He steps closer to the tub and gathers Will to himself, picking him out of there to carry to bed. He wraps him in a blanket, uncaring that it will soak up the water still stark on Will’s skin. Will makes a harsh sound of protest when Hannibal steps away to push off his heavy boots, and without hesitation, Hannibal returns to bed, boots and all, and curls around him friend, pulling him close.

“We have survived,” he reminds him, quietly. “We have survived against all odds. We have beaten any path set us by fate, long ago. From the moment I fell into that swamp and you decided to save me, we were bound, and nothing, no one, not a single entity alive or dead, real or imagined, could tear us apart then.”

Will splays his fingers seeking out warmth but there’s only stiff armor unyielding beneath. Stained with sweat and soil and blood, all at once what keeps him safe and what bears the marks of his ignominy, cruelties forced to his hands by those of others. It isn’t right that he had to hurt so intensely, for so long as to be unfathomable. It isn’t right that he’s become a warlord, rather than remained the gentle bright boy that Will knew before.

He curls closer and hides his tears against Hannibal’s chest, allowing this embarrassing display only because he knows this shame pales in compare to Hannibal’s suffering.

“Tell me what happened,” Hannibal asks, scarcely able to cool the boiling in his blood. “Who hurt you?”

“I slipped.”

“You didn’t.”

“I fell.”

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll make certain they do if I’ve got to cut all their tongues loose in the process,” Hannibal intones, squeezing Will tighter against him.

“I didn’t get a good look at him before he caught me against the wall,” Will whispers.

Hannibal understands this, the world of safe denial where no names mattered because no one would answer for anything with them. He long ago stopped trying to deny what happened, but for years he had told himself it was because he was in the way, he was asking for it with his disobedience, he was too mouthy, he was dressed wrong, he hadn’t worked hard enough.

For years he told himself he deserved it.

“You did,” Hannibal whispers. “You did and you’re convincing yourself you didn’t. You’re telling yourself that had you been in a different place you wouldn’t have called this upon yourself. Never, never let your mind poison you like that, Will, none of this was of your making. Please, please tell me.”

Will sucks his lips between his teeth and shakes his head. Hannibal won’t want to hear that Will knows he should’ve let them have him back at the swamps. Maybe then they’d have stolen him off instead of Hannibal, maybe then they’d have brought them together, maybe maybe maybe…

If only.

“It don’t matter,” Will finally says, sniffing hard and pushing back enough to let Hannibal see him. He sets his jaw as his friend thumbs along his scratched cheek, his bruised mouth, the anger radiant and hot as firelight as it crackles sharper. “I just got pushed around a bit, that’s all. Caught me off-guard until I could make it clear that it was a poor decision to do so.”

Hannibal strokes Will’s face again, gently, and hums. He doesn’t push, nor ask again who the man was that hurt him. Several names and filthy faces pass behind his eyes already, the usual suspects of such attacks. He sighs against Will and presses a kiss to his forehead.

“A warm bath helps more than a cold one,” Hannibal murmurs after a while. “To relax the muscles out of the tension they’ve worked themselves into. We can put something cold against your lips and cheek, some sassafras atop.”

“I’m alright,” Will complains. “You ain’t gotta fuss over me.” He complains, but he pulls himself closer. He tilts his head to feel Hannibal’s lips against his cheek, shivering at such heat against rubbed-raw skin. He brings up his fingers to be kissed, too, where the nails cracked and bear black blood marks from the beds beneath. Finally his lips, held in a gentle kiss, until Will sighs free.

He swallows dry and it hurts when he does. It hurts worse when Hannibal looks to him for answer of what he can do, and Will speaks before he can stop himself or mute the tremor in his words.

“What the hell are we gonna do?” Will asks softly. “Is this it?”

Hannibal strokes his hair and soothes Will as much as he can without words. For a long time, this was it for him. Once he killed the man who destroyed his hope for any life at all, let alone a happy one, Hannibal had stepped into his shoes willingly. He raided and killed, destroying the boy within him further with every mark against his name and against his skin. He didn’t deserve to be the boy that had lost Will in the swamp, he didn’t deserve to be anything but this monster until someone put a blade to his throat as he had to the man who ruined him.

But Will does not deserve this. Will is strong and clever and brave. Will, who found him without ever even looking, Will who had always remained the reason for Hannibal staying alive. He doesn’t deserve this fear and pain and captivity. He doesn’t deserve this cruelty and knowledge that the man he wants so much to love is allowing it to happen.

Hannibal cares little for himself. He cares the world for Will. He always has.

“No,” he promises, kissing Will’s hair and gently easing him from bed again, following him to the bathroom where he sets the water to heat before pouring it into the tub. “No, this isn’t it. It is not a life, it is merely half of one. It is survival.”

He stands, easing his heavy and hard armor from his shoulders, unwinding the leather on his knuckles and wrists. He looks a moment at the woven band Will had given him, stark and strong and more meaningful than anything else.

“You and I,” he says. “You and I will live.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“The old farm,” he says, “betwixt our lands. The far right corner if you face the building, from the doorway. More than enough ammo to keep your new weapons loaded for quite some time.”_
> 
> _Aberash jerks her chin upward in a nod and one of the women departs, gathering another from the copse of trees as she goes. With a tilted smile, Hannibal watches their shadowy shapes shrink across the terrain. Never alone. Never without support and company. He envies them their cleverness, both innate and shared._
> 
> _“What do you want, Hannibal?” Aberash asks._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

The moon is high when Hannibal climbs the garden wall. He doesn’t take a lamp or a torch, and he doesn’t look back as he crosses the border of the lands he has claimed and moves onwards, north.

It is only at nighttime when it feels as though the world is not broken. Birds still quietly chirp their evening songs, and insects call to each other, seeking a mate or a swarm to join for the night. They do not bother Hannibal, and Hannibal does not bother them. He does not draw a weapon when he hears the distinct click of one being drawn on him. They are still far, he’s just passed the first scouts. They won’t do him harm if he keeps walking and does them none himself.

A bird call, louder than the others, echoes across the empty plains, and another answers immediately, deeper and cooler.

Hannibal keeps walking. After a few more minutes, he hears some footsteps join his own. He keeps on, until the next click is followed by a loud pop and a burst of dirt at his feet. Only then does he stop, guns clattering against his back as he uplifts his hands.

“Got a lotta metal on your back there, warlord.”

His lips twist to a slight smile at the lingering Cajun patois in the scout’s words - one of several women watching him now, for they never travel alone. “On my back,” he agrees, “and not in my hands. A delivery.”

“Ain’t expecting a delivery,” comes the call back. He turns his head just a little to try and see the source of the voice but the click of a hammer holds him still, facing forward. “You strapped?”

“No.”

“You gonna stand there like a good boy while we check?”

“Of course,” he says, tilting his head simply as allowance. From behind, the footsteps come up quick. Swift hands across his chest, feeling over the simple shirt he wears in place of armor. Beneath his jacket, up and down his legs, and finally curling hard between with a hoarse laugh before he’s released. He grimaces but makes no protest, neither when the firearms are stripped from his shoulder.

“What’s your business, warlord?” The woman steps into view, two more shadows behind her, more flanking him - he needn’t see them to feel their presence. She tilts a brow, auburn hair tied into a knot at the back of her head, cheeks freckle-spattered and scarlet from sun and wind. He thinks of Will and raises his chin, hands lowering.

“Aberash,” he says. “I need to speak with her.”

“She ain’t on patrol tonight.”

“I need to speak with her,” he says again.

“Not a good look, making demands when you’re told you ain’t gonna get ‘em the first time.”

Hannibal’s smile is little, but it lingers in his eyes. He doesn’t make sudden movements, not around them, but he does slip his hands into his pockets. He doesn’t respond to the immediate tension at the gesture, and instead pulls from the depths of the folded soft cloth a bullet.

“You will hardly look good bringing her guns without their ammo,” he offers back. “I merely need to speak. Should she wish her retinue to remain, you are more than welcome. I won’t take more time than I need here.”

The auburn-haired girl narrows her eyes and slips a gaze to the woman beside her. For a moment, neither say anything, and then the other turns to lope back to pass the message on. Hannibal’s keeper holds out her hand, flat, and with a smile, he sets the bullet to it. She curls her fingers in such a way as to brush his own - in something like temptation, though for something neither desire, and just as much a taunt.

There is always a curious pull when their camps overlap. Animal instincts for survival as a species thrumming undercurrent to the greater instinct for individual survival. Hannibal knows they keep men amongst their ranks, those vetted and attested to as trustworthy, primarily for that purpose. He imagines it a much more willing coupling than what takes place in his own encampment.

It seems unkind that he would feel a tug of pity at the thought of its end. Emotions are insensible, however, whether for better or for worse. The wind lifts and Hannibal allows it to carry away the undesirable sensation of regret.

“Catherine, is it?”

“Cat,” she answers, curt.

Hannibal hums. “There was a queen once, named Catherine. Long, long ago. Catherine the Great, she was called. The longest-ruling queen of her land, who lead a golden age of her far-spanning empire.”

“Oh yeah?” There’s a hint of a smile, much as Cat allows one. “Real bad-ass bitch?”

“Indeed,” he says. “Though some say she was mad, it was only her enemies who spoke of her that way. She had a penchant for keeping many lovers at once. And horses, in the same stead.”

Cat blinks. Her laugh snaps free, loud and earnest, delighted by this to such a degree that she’s forced to bring a hand to her mouth to quiet herself. Belly quivering as she tries to stifle the sound, she shakes her head and snorts. “Maybe I oughta go by Catherine then. Queen Catherine Horse-fucker.”

“I can guarantee you, you will never be forgotten with such a name,” Hannibal tells her and she merely raises a haughty eyebrow in reply. There’s a shifting sound behind her and Cat turns to look, grinning at her friend as she returns with Aberash’s answer.

“He’s fucking funny when he wants to be,” she says.

“All men think they are,” comes the curt reply. “She said she’ll talk. But you’re not going near the camp.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“She says the stream that runs parallel the old railway line, you know it?”

“Well,” Hannibal replies. 

“An hour,” the scout tells him. “And she ain’t gonna come alone.”

“I would expect nothing less,” Hannibal bows his head and winks briefly at Cat when he straightens again. “I thank you for your gracious reception. Should Aberash decide not to make it, I wish you well finding the ammunition needed to fill your guns.”

Both women make a crude gesture towards him, but Cat grins as she does, and Hannibal takes what he can get.

Unarmed, unarmored, he heads directly east, off the battered old road and beaten-down dust and towards the waste. It’s flat here, miles from the swamps but not so far as to lose the smoothness of the land that dips towards the sea. Around him, the world becomes monochrome, black but for the silvered highlights of the moon exposed with no clouds to cover it.

Through the thicket of trees, one foot before the other to not get turned around. Slower here, to make little sound and listen keenly for any others. A branch snaps in the nearby distance, some heavy creature startled from its slumber. There are deer now, plentiful in their hollows. He has seen pigs as well, made wild in their freedom from domestication, sleek and wiry-haired and with the security of numbers, unafraid of human interlopers.

The track is buried in grass just beyond the trees, the crick hidden until one is nearly atop it. Hannibal slows so he doesn’t skid down the bank, and alone, he waits.

He doesn’t count the time he sits, he doesn’t care if Aberash comes later and with an entire clan of women at her side. At this point he cares little for reputation. He cares for the man in his bed, sleeping soundly due to the valerian root Hannibal had boiled with his tea - a small deception he hopes he is forgiven. He has damn near fortified his room after coming home to Will injured, and he knows that it won’t be breached, but even so, he worries. He wonders.

“Deep in thought, warlord?”

“Dangerous habits I can’t seem to get rid of,” Hannibal replies, not even turning to Aberash where she stands. He waits for her to come to him. She knows he will do her no harm, and he can hear the three women - at the very least - she has brought to their meeting. “I find myself at a crossroads, in needing to make a difficult decision.”

“Want me to hold your hand for you?” she snorts.

“I would like some feminine logic to help weigh in on the process,” Hannibal counters, amused.

She slicks her tongue across her teeth and sucks them noisily. “You ain’t called me all the way out here for a damn philosophical discussion, I hope.”

“Of sorts,” he says, “but not only. You received the rifles?”

“Three rifles, two shotguns. Very generous except for the fact they’re fuckin’ useless without ammunition.”

Hannibal makes an agreeable sound and slowly stands. Weapons clatter as they’re trained on him, but he turns to see Aberash laying her hand against the barrel of one to lower it.

“The old farm,” he says, “betwixt our lands. The far right corner if you face the building, from the doorway. More than enough to keep your new weapons loaded for quite some time.”

Aberash jerks her chin upward in a nod and one of the women departs, gathering another from the copse of trees as she goes. With a tilted smile, Hannibal watches their shadowy shapes shrink across the terrain. Never alone. Never without support and company. He envies them their cleverness, both innate and shared.

“What do you want, Hannibal?” Aberash asks, exasperated but not unkind.

“Passage,” he says. “For two.”

“Two?”

“To the mountains.”

“You didn’t answer the question, Hannibal.”

“Technically,” he points out, “you didn’t ask me one.”

Aberash raises an eyebrow and purses her lips, and Hannibal sighs in resignation. He learned early to never fight with a woman, their patience is never something to be trifled with.

“Myself and a young man,” he elaborates. “Armed with only essential weapons, two packs between us.”

“Would you seek shelter?”

“Safe passage through the Citadel, nothing more,” Hannibal assures her. “We would walk, and we would keep walking.”

“And the Church?”

“Men do poorly without a leader. They take a long time to elect one and forgo important necessities such as keeping their homes safe. What becomes of the Church or those within it would be beyond my knowledge or care.”

This straightens Aberash’s shoulders and lifts her chin. She narrows her eyes but not in challenge, searching Hannibal’s expression, down to the tired slump of his own shoulders, seeking between the words he speaks. The message is as clear as he can make without saying it outright.

Of course, that’s hardly enough when he’s suggesting what he’s suggesting. Aberash takes a step closer.

“You’re leaving the Church.”

“Yes.”

“You and a young man,” she says, drawing a breath and drawing in her brows but pausing as Hannibal lifts his hand. He shakes his head.

“My age. He’s my age. You know me well enough, Aberash, do not cast such shadows.”

She hums, lips worked together in thought. “This is substantial,” she says. “Heavy shit. That farmhouse -”

“Everything,” he says. “It’s everything extra but what he and I will take with us. The entire cache. There is some stock still at the Church, so were someone to attempt to besiege it there would not be a lack of risk, but were those who did well-armed enough...”

The woman beside Aberash whistles low and lets her gun slide to her hip. They conspire in whispers, and Hannibal does not ask them to make their words known to him. All he needs is an agreement. An answer. Assurance that this life he’s ripped bloody from the remains of the one before is not all he has to live.

“Why, warlord?”

“Merely surviving is not an option here, any longer,” Hannibal replies simply. “The ground is rotted with ill intent where it could be used to farm or sustain a larger community. The men will not be tamed and do more harm to themselves than they think they do others. They are rowdy and bored, and I grow sick looking at them.”

“Why stay so long, then?” Abarash asks. “This cache existed long before today. You and I spoke long before today.”

“I was waiting,” Hannibal tells her. “And now I needn’t.”

Hannibal knows the narrowness of her gaze, piercing in the same manner that Will looks not at him but directly through. No armor can sway their perception, no posturing can conceal him. They see him as if he were naked and trembling before them, clad only in bare truth that seems to be the most sturdy and threadbare of garments.

“For him,” she asks.

Hannibal nods, and it’s enough.

“I’ve gotta bring this back to the others before we can attempt what you’re offering to us,” she says. “We’ll lose people.”

“Yes.”

“But we’ll be rid of you.”

“Yes,” Hannibal agrees, lips quirking despite himself. “Assuredly and permanently so. He and I wish to leave, and whatever becomes of the rest is no longer my concern. As of tonight. As of now. Give me passage and come what may.”

Aberash regards her companion, questions and answers given in no more than a look and a shrug. From what Hannibal has learned of how their settlement operates, he knows that she is important - a voice to be followed amidst the other women who scout and patrol. But she is one voice of many, in a settlement that functions less like a snake and more as an ouroboros. Every part of it matters. No leader dictates to them.

But she has authority of her own, all the same, and tilts her chin up, once.

“If we see you and one other come through, we’ll let you pass. I’ll send word to the others. They’ll know not to stop you.”

“Or shoot.”

“Or shoot,” she agrees with a grin, flashing white in the moonlight. It fades, little by little, until she steps forward and offers a hand, brow creased. “I’m trusting you that what you say is true.”

“And I trust that you’ll hunt me down if it proves anything else,” he agrees, taking her hand with a firm shake.

“Oh,” she laughs, “indeed.”

Hannibal inclines his head and Aberash whistles, just once, short and sharp, and she and her retinue depart to the shadows from whence they came. Hannibal knows that a pair will be left to watch him, to see him back to the Church and return to report. He knows he has nothing to fear from them, not if their agreement holds true. He trusts Aberash, a woman with a head on her shoulders and a mind for diplomacy. He knows that he and Will will make it to the mountains unharmed by the clan that stands between here and there.

He moves to return to the Church when he feels the cool of the latest hour seep into his bones. He goes as quietly as he had arrived, and climbs the wall like a shadow before disappearing beyond it.

\---

Dawn breaks with a heavy Will against Hannibal’s chest and no other sound in the Church at all. The warlord did not sleep upon arriving home. He spent time in the garden, touching every tree and shrub and water-dwelling plant that he and Will brought here and kept alive. He knows the garden will not be neglected long, once they leave it. After the garden he walked the building itself, through the echoing great hall, seeking up to the ceiling above them all with eyes well accustomed to the dark. He hadn’t been disturbed or interrupted. At last, he climbed into bed, and Will moved towards him for the heat and comfort both, and didn’t wake.

Hannibal cradles him close, one hand against the back of his head, the other around his slender form. He tucks his nose against the springy curls growing long since Will first sheared his matted locks away on the first night they found each other again. No longer does he smell of filth and waste, no longer do insects harry him and speckle his skin with marks. No longer is he starved and furious, but instead, has grown strong through his work and once more the lithe and fierce creature Hannibal knew in youth.

He is fit. He is healthy. He is as powerful in body as he is mind and Hannibal does not fear for him.

For what then does he fear?

Himself, cast asunder again, given to the whims of a savage world. They will relinquish their bodies to fate and luck, in hopes that the elements are kind and that in time they find a place to claim as their own. For the complex relationship he bears with this place, it has in whatever way become a home for them. He has lost so many that the thought brings his arms firmer around his friend.

But is not this man the truest home he’s ever known?

“Go back to sleep,” Will mutters, burrowing against Hannibal’s chest hair with a sleepy huff.

Hannibal sighs into his hair and stills, in a semblance of sleep, as Will returns to his gentle snoring against him. Truly, this man is his home. This man is his life, not his survival. Both have survived for the other ‘til now, and their future belongs to building a life together. Living. Being. Becoming, together.

Hannibal closes his eyes and dozes, thinking of their little home near the swamp. He remembers every hot summer day where, entirely stripped, the two of them would climb up to fortify the roof, or take running leaps into the cool clean pool they claimed as their own. He remembers the rainstorms that kept them inside for days, curled together or chewing moodily at the jerky they had dried in the scarce sun. Those were the days they would talk, about everything and anything at all.

Sometimes they spoke of forever.

Rarely did they speak of what would happen should their little heaven be broken.

Both knew that someday it would be, but both hoped they would leave their little home together, and build another. And now they can. Now, with another impending apocalypse upon them, another house ruined and them driven from it, they can start a life together that they have wanted.

They are stronger now, in body and mind. They have witnessed the worst of humanity and suffered its effects - Hannibal, at the hands of others and their violence, and Will, wandering alone with no hope of company. As the leather they wear, they have been forged in fire and made fiercer for it.

This is their time. This is the only time. It could be no other way, no other place, no other period in their lives but now.

“Will,” he whispers, once the sun has risen enough to spill its light across the floor. There’s a grumble in response and Hannibal grins, despite all that’s about to rain down on them. This is his to keep, to fight for and preserve. Every grumpy morning and ecstatic night, and all the back-breaking glorious work that comes between.

“Will,” he says again, and there’s an outright groan this time.

“Good Christ, what?”

“Get up.”

“You fuckin’ get up,” Will mumbles, turning his face into his arm and slipping from Hannibal as he kisses his shoulder.

“I am,” Hannibal promises him, smiling wide. “And I will drag you from this bed buck naked if you’re not out of it on your own volition by the time I return.”

Will curses him again and buries himself against the pillow’s warmth as soon as Hannibal abdicates it. Blankets pulled around his face, despite the heat, he curls small and snores again before Hannibal’s even upright. Hannibal watches him a moment more, with a passing wonder at the energy that once dragged them up far before the sun, but true to his word - and with a stroke along Will’s sleeping form - he steps away to the washroom to relieve himself.

All of this, gone. Hot baths and mirrors, shaving and soap. A soft clean bed and blankets, a pillow to share when they lay pressed close. Sturdy walls and security, to say nothing of the ready food and water available to them. All gone.

Abandoned, to save themselves succumbing to the same fate as those who live in the chapel outside their door. To imagine this as a resolution to their problems is dishonest. They are exchanging, nothing more or less, but on their terms. On their own backs. Together, again, with no one else to plague their steps. No longer a warlord. No longer a wanderer.

Hannibal relishes the freedom with a stretch of broad shoulders and a tilt that cracks the bones in his neck. He groans relief and shakes himself dry, sliding into trousers before he leaves their bedroom and seeks out another.

The church lays quiet, still, so early in the morning. Some men snore, others just lay curled into little balls beneath their rough-wool blankets. Hannibal pads past them on practiced silent feet and turns into one of the alcoves not yet destroyed by weather or the men within the church that create their own storms.

Within, on a thin mattress carefully cared for, the feeling of which Hannibal remembers still, lays sprawled the only man of the initial party that had found him who yet lives.

Hannibal regards him as he lies, world-worn and older, tired and beaten down and strong enough to stand again. To say he likes Kincaid would be inaccurate. To say he respects him would be more wrong still. Yet there is something that had always held Hannibal back from raising his hand against him, from subjecting him to the same fate as the others.

When he slept on this bed, he had slept on it, he was not turned face-down into the worn and sweaty foam and forced to spread his legs. Never here. Never by this man, brusque and rough as he is. Hannibal swallows and steps closer to kick against Kincaid’s leg to wake him.

The man grunts and tells him to fuck himself, without so much as a look to see who it is. He stinks of the rancid drink the men have fermented from the bread Hannibal provided them long ago, its yeast distilled and purified, run through fruit to provide a sickeningly sweet facsimile of what they imagine wine might be. Hannibal has tasted it, and found it wanting, overpowering to his tongue. He has not faulted them for seeking its effects. How could he, knowing how their existence must weigh upon those wise enough to feel it?

“Kincaid,” Hannibal says, and at this, the man stirs. He rubs a hand against his eyes and pushes upward, alert.

“Warlord.”

“I need to speak with you.”

“‘Course,” he says, squinting, then widening his eyes as Hannibal slowly kneels and settles beside him.

He is taller, now, than when they shared his mattress last, but he coils himself enough to settle face to face with Kincaid. For a moment neither move at all, the warlord watching the man who had for so long protected him, despite, perhaps, his more prominent nature. Then Hannibal licks his lips open and starts to speak.

“I want you to go east this morning,” he says. “Scouting, not raiding. Take no one unless you absolutely must.”

“How far?”

“Past the marsh until you can see the old schoolyard.”

“Why?”

Hannibal narrows his eyes. Kincaid is the only man who has ever questioned him and not fallen to a beating for it. He is the only man Hannibal listens to when he suggests a detour or an adjustment to a plan. He is hardy, a survivor. Yet here, now, Hannibal does not appreciate the hint at disobedience. 

“Because I need to know that area,” Hannibal tells him. “I’m looking at expanding.”

Kincaid wets his lips with his tongue, and with evident misgiving tightening the corners of his eyes, he writhes a little closer. They are near now, near enough to smear their mouths together and shove their bodies to ill-fitting unison. Neither do. Neither dare. It’s far too late for that now, and Hannibal narrows his gaze in response to even so slight a movement.

“That’s two days’ trip,” Kincaid says, carefully. He isn’t arguing - he’s informing. It’s a fine line but Hannibal knows he is one of the scant few who is aware at all of its presence, let alone capable of navigating it. “We’ll need supplies.”

“Take what you will. Who you will. Go,” Hannibal says.

Something in Kincaid tenses, bristling. Hairs on end and brow creased, he draws a deep breath and sighs it slow, seeking for an answer to an unspoken question in his warlord, Hannibal, the boy who watches him.

“When?”

“Now.”

Another motion, slight and nervous, and Kincaid swallows. He watches Hannibal and Hannibal watches him, and when the warlord sets a hand to his shoulder and squeezes, and uses the leverage to push himself to standing once more, he curses.

“Dammit, boy,” he sighs. “How d’you still see me as a decent man?”

“I don’t think I ever have,” Hannibal replies, sending him a smile. “Decent men don't live out these parts and these lives.”

“Cocky shit.”

Hannibal says nothing more. He just turns on his heel and makes for his room once more.

Predictably, within, Will snores comfortably in the same position Hannibal had left him. Without a word, he snaps the blankets off of him, smiling when Will curls up with a groan of protest. His slight form bends smaller, wholly bare, knees drawn up nearly to his belly.

“Fuck off,” Will whines, but his voice jerks high as Hannibal bends to take him up in arms, coiled as small as he was in bed. Will shoves a hand against his chest but it no sooner makes contact than spreads through the thick, warm hair he loves so much. Nuzzling into the nook of Hannibal’s arm, nose tucked against his armpit, he draws a breath and settles again.

“I warned you,” Hannibal says, voice a steady undercurrent to Will’s pitched fussy sounds. “We’ve got to get up.”

“I’m fuckin’ up.”

“Only because I’m holding you.”

“So?”

“Dress,” Hannibal tells him, kissing Will’s hair and dipping his hold to set Will’s feet to the floor. Adorably, Will curls tighter so as to avoid it, and when he is finally set down, grumbling, Hannibal is kneeling at his feet.

“Where's the fuckin’ fire?” Will mumbles, rubbing his eyes with the back of his wrist.

“I want to show you something.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“If I didn't love you so much,” Hannibal sighs, kissing Will’s leg and pushing to stand again. “For me. Please. I will find us a place to rest our heads for the warm afternoon but now, just dress and come with me.”

Will sways, unsteady, and finds his grounding with fingers swept through Hannibal’s hair. Golden strands, shot through with wisps of silver, glisten beneath his hand and drape before dark eyes spread earnest and beseeching. Will draws a breath, deep, and sighs it out again, short.

“Yeah,” he says, with a laugh catching the end of his assent. “Yeah, alright. Get up.”

Hannibal does, in an elegant unfurling, and standing, set his hands to Will’s cheeks. He brings him close into a kiss and releases him just as warmly, freeing Will to set out for his pants and a shirt from the assemblage of acquired clothing he keeps strewn across the floor. He steps into a pair of trousers, tugging them up and fastening them. The shirt he holds a moment, lip bitten between his teeth, and he watches as Hannibal dresses in a far tidier fashion.

“I love you,” Will says, echoing after minutes passed the confession of his friend. “Even when you wake me up too goddamn early, I love you.”

Hannibal wrinkles his nose at him, an answer in itself, and returns to dressing. He works beneath each layer of clothing something they will need. A straight razor for shaving. A knife into his belt. Seeds and cuttings in small cloth bags he folded the night before, from the plants he wanted to take with them.

As he dresses he smiles, thinking of Will and his delight at being in a new home. Of building one of their very own without anyone standing in the way. Not ever again.

He hears Will curse softly as he tries to yank his boot on without sitting to do it, and turns to watch, brow raised and smile warm. Will gives him a narrow glare and offers an obscene gesture. Hannibal’s heart heaves and he looks away, secretly delighted.

“Like you can do it any more fuckin’ gracefully,” he mutters.

Will relents unto himself and drops back heavy to the bed. It’s with a furrowed brow and smile caught in his eyes that he watches Hannibal approach, and kneel once more. Will draws a breath to tell him to fuck off but never manages to form the words, as careful hands lace his boots snug but not too tight, perfectly fitted. Instead, Will sets his hand to Hannibal’s hair and curls it against his cheek. Only when the second boot is secured does will lift Hannibal’s chin, and bring their eyes to meet.

Though any details of Hannibal’s intention remain obscured, Will can see clearly that something is changing, as readily as he notes the shortening of days in winter and the first burgeoning buds of leaves in spring. He parts his lips with his tongue and shakes his head. He doesn’t ask, though, and Hannibal offers no more than a kiss against his palm.

A request for trust, granted when Will strokes his thumb across Hannibal’s lips.

“Let’s go,” Will says, standing and bringing Hannibal to his feet alongside.

Together.

Always together.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Will tells him that he loves him. He tells him that he loves this. He asks for more, slower, harder, cursing breathless when Hannibal’s tongue pushes against his slit. It’s a reward, given and received by both, for the work they’ve accomplished. It’s a reassurance that there is more to life than their endless litany of tasks, and that no matter how they were bent and beaten, no matter how more trials lay ahead, they have not broken._
> 
> _They are, here and together, the same boys they ever were._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Only when the firefight rang crackling like brushfire across the countryside was Will able to fully grasp the enormity of what they’d done. Told to pack necessities, he didn’t ask why and as war racketed loud from the south he spared no thought for those under siege. For a moment he mourned the passing comforts they’d acquired, and for longer still the garden that had been both their salvation.

And then Hannibal showed him the cuttings and seeds, packed carefully alongside the clothes and tools, water and food they brought. They carried with them one weapon each, and Will’s knife. Will told him on the first night they slept beneath the stars that he thought they were going foraging. Camping, maybe. They laughed then until the sounds twisted raw, and Will soothed the shudders from Hannibal’s body with hushed whispers and firm hands.

Every step was freedom from the loneliness and pain, shrugging loose in heated arguments and smoldering affection the fetters that bound their spirits tight. Every new day was a blessing. Across plains and low-slung mountains curving sleekly over the land, beneath blue skies and smears of stars silvering the darkness, through wooded areas and past bands of women roving alongside them like wolves tracking prey. Hannibal explained to Will their enclave, and the terse and temporary accord that granted them passage so long as they continued through. He confessed to Will that he forewarned Kincaid who took Blanchard with him, to avoid the savage storm sweeping south.

It doesn’t matter much now.

And it concerns Will far less than the little twists of green writhing upward from the soil that send him loping towards the house, laughing Hannibal’s name.

The place had once been a farm shack, maybe. Not the main house, one of the smaller outposts with an oil lamp and some food to watch the sheep over cool nights. Hardly hurt by the Event or the people passing through after, it had taken them only days to fix the room and sweep out the decades of debris and make the place livable. They stripped slats of wood from the trees nearby with little more than well-angled strikes of their hatchets, and fixed them between the gaps where old wood gave way. By their prior standards, it’s a hovel.

By their new ones, it’s a home.

“They’re growing!”

Hannibal looks up from the mattress of straw they’ve built up, and tilts his head. “The garden?”

“The garden!” Will lands on his knees beside him and grins against his friend. “The first shoots are up, turning and twisting into the sun.”

“Have you been watching them all day?”

“All week,” Will laughs, admitting the silliness of it all. “And here they are.”

Hannibal’s eyes narrow in his delight and he snares Will around the middle to drag him closer, and then atop him entirely.

“Too much spare time on your hands,” he scolds fondly. “I should keep you busier.”

“Fuck off,” Will laughs, trying desperately - and failing - to squirm free. “I ain’t seen you out there helping today. Lying here in bed like a goddamn prince.”

“Preserving my energy.”

“By not working,” snorts Will, sputtering again as Hannibal presses heavier against him. “What good’s all that energy if you’re not gonna -”

“Oh, I’m gonna,” Hannibal intones, and Will curls his arms around his neck, grinning against his cheek.

“It’s the beans up first,” he says. “Ought to see the greens start comin’ in soon, too. It’s good soil here, Hannibal, and it’ll be better once we start the compost and -”

He’s kissed to quiet, humming low against his friend’s mouth and bending fingers through his hair. Scruffy-cheeked and sunburnt, bronzed by the sun and wild-haired from the wind, they have earned this peace after weeks of wandering away from the Church, and years before lost in far more desolate wildernesses of the spirit. Brash and wiry as the little seedlings to which they tend, they grow now in the healthy earth they can call their own.

Hannibal settles on top of Will and strokes his palm down his face, touching him and soothing him. He’s let his beard grow soft and short, and it suits him. Hannibal has allowed his hair to grow longer, braiding it absently once in a while and delighting in Will slowly unwinding the plaits when they’re in bed.

“You almost missed your calling,” Hannibal purrs. “You’re an excellent farmer.”

“Should catch some of the wild piglets that run around here,” Will considers. “And I heard some ducks further down the way -”

“No,” Hannibal laughs. “They won’t stay even a day.”

“Ducks return every year to the place they were born,” Will points out.

“Perhaps if we could catch the small ones.”

“We could raise them up. Eat the eggs they lay.”

“Eat them,” shrugs Hannibal.

Will squints at him, but relents his narrow look with a grin. He arches upward and presses a kiss to the corner of Hannibal’s lips. He parts his lips against Hannibal’s scruff and sighs heat against his cheek. “There’s so much work to do,” he says, smiling wide. “Fortifying the house. Making it nice, protected from the elements. All the farming. A better way for water than going to the crick every damn day. Animals, maybe. Clothes.”

“We don’t need clothes very often,” Hannibal points out, and Will snorts. “Hardly anyone around for miles, who would see?”

“Winter would prove a bit fuckin’ crisp without them.”

“There are ways to get warm.”

“Your mind’s just stuck in one place, ain’t it? Thinking of nothing else.”

“I never think of anything else but you,” Hannibal points out, nuzzling against him and kissing Will warmly until he laughs, gently shoving against him with the heels of his hands. “We have time for the work,” Hannibal relents after a while. “We have the woods nearby, we can insulate the walls with another layer. Perhaps put something in the middle to keep the little house dry and warm in winter. Cool in summer.”

“We can keep searching for the farmhouse,” Will adds. “Find the shed. Maybe some tools.”

“Build fences to house the piglets you intend to bring home,” Hannibal muses.

Will bites his lip and bends upward, grinning shameless and scarlet-cheeked as their bodies contact at shoulders and chest and belly and groin. He’s a dusty mess, mud on his boots and sweat sticking his clothes to skin. Hannibal now squints at him, rumbling a sound so low it’s more felt than heard.

“It’s good, ain’t it,” Will asks, sweeping his mouth against Hannibal’s own in a lingering kiss. His answer comes in the same way, lips parting to slip their tongues together, hay shifting beneath their lazy rutting. Hannibal slides a knee between Will’s thighs, spreading them wider. Will rocks against his leg, satisfied by the friction, and more so by the curve of Hannibal’s form as he grinds against Will’s hip in return.

Any number of things could go wrong that would upset their tenuous existence. An injury or illness, a blight that wipes out their newly growing crops. A fire, a bad storm, a flood that raises the crick above its banks. Their life is fragile now, struggling against odds that to truly consider would be terrifying.

But they are ferocious, and they will protect what they’ve claimed.

This place.

Their lives.

Each other, against the world.

Kissing harder, Will twists their mouths roughly together and pulls at Hannibal’s shirt to bare his back. He squeezes his legs together and moans at the contact, rocking in counterpoint to rub firm against the other. Fingernails curl against Hannibal’s bare skin and scrape slowly upward over twitching muscle.

“I love you,” Will murmurs, lips glossy with spit and pinked from pressure and parting to a crooked grin. “Lazy bastard.”

“I have hardly been as lazy as you think,” Hannibal protests, amused, but he shrugs his shirt off when Will demands he does. He kisses Will and gently turns his head to look at one of their thus far bare walls. Against it stands the old stove they had found, and dug up from around the back of the shack. Hannibal has attached a pipe and directed it to the ceiling and through.

“Come winter,” he says. “We will have quite the cosy home. And we needn’t use the cookfire outside to make dinner anymore. Very helpful for when the rains come, no?”

Will tilts his head back and with his gaze follows the pipe, scrubbed of age and damn near to new again. He grins at the hole carved out of the wall through which the pipe extends, and splays a hand across his face, laughing when Hannibal suckles at his bared throat. They’ll be able to bring in firewood, heat water for baths and purity, and warm the space itself. They’ll be able to cook more than black-charred meat. If they can find a pot, they can make stews and if they find a lid they can try to start baking bread and if they find any jars they might can preserves and -

Hannibal’s teeth graze tender skin and Will’s thoughts disperse with a moan. He circles Hannibal’s hard body with his arms and bows his head to kiss his bare shoulder. “You’re goddamn incredible,” he laughs.

“Language,” teases Hannibal.

Will only manages the first hiss of an F before he’s firmly kissed again. He bites his bottom lip and shoves up against him, their bodies battling for pleasure. Each ever eager to prove their devotion to the other, they rut and wrestle in equal turns, Will’s quickness well-matched to Hannibal’s strength.

Will’s boots fall to the floor with heavy thumps. Hannibal slips a hand between them to palm against Will’s groin, and then deliberately edge up to work his pants open. He wants nothing more than closeness, nothing more than to press to Will chest to chest and rub between his legs until he grows hard. He wants to slip between his thighs and taste him until the pleasure overwhelms Will and he loses himself.

That’s all.

That intimacy, that kindness, that trust between them.

Hannibal sits up enough to grin at Will and coaxes him to lift his hips so he can slide his pants off of him, palms caressing the soft skin and wiry hair there until he has him sufficiently bared. Hannibal has found that the more he merely looks at Will, the darker his cheeks grow. It’s lovely that something so simple can undo him so quickly, so he looks.

Will squirms, but Hannibal’s hands on his thighs keep him where he is. He tries to dig his heels against the bed. He tries to push them off Hannibal’s calves. He tries to turn and tries to cover himself but Hannibal merely moves his hands away, patiently countering his embarrassed maneuvers, and button by button working open his shirt. With a curse and a blush that spreads from cheeks to neck to chest, Will huffs out a breath. His cock curves purple-headed and full against his belly, twitching in response to Hannibal’s attention every time it lowers there. Warm hands, calloused rough, spread his shirt open to expose his chest, fingertips fanning over dark pebbled nipples and Will tries to bite back his moan but can’t restrain it.

Hannibal holds his ankle, and reaches with his other to remove Will’s hand from his face.

“You just gonna stare at it?” Will demands, swearing again when Hannibal merely shrugs up a shoulder in response.

He could, he thinks, stare at Will for hours if the man would let him. He does, sometimes, in the mornings, when Will remains sleeping spread and comfortable in bed, and Hannibal does nothing more than lift the sheets and marvel at him. Pale scars and tanned skin and life, just life, written against him.

But he relents, this time, he bends his body to kiss against Will’s stomach, and he smiles when he feels it tense with anticipation. He knows where the kiss is going, he knows what Hannibal has planned for him, keeping him pinned in bed for as long as it takes. And slowly, slowly, Hannibal’s lips make it down to the head of Will’s cock, already slick and twitching in response to every motion he makes. Slowly, slowly, Hannibal envelopes the head with his lips and hums as he sucks Will deeper.

Will groans low, arm across his eyes and his other hand snared softly in Hannibal’s hair. His body lifts, pulled to taut attention by his friend’s firm suckling, a slow thrust upward in time with Hannibal’s push-and-pull descent. Belly rippling taut, Will’s shivering muscles move like long grasses in wind, carrying down to firm his thighs and curl his toes.

Will tells him that he loves him. He tells him that he loves this. He asks for more, slower, harder, cursing breathless when Hannibal’s tongue pushes against his slit. It’s a reward, given and received by both, for the work they’ve accomplished. It’s a reassurance that there is more to life than their endless litany of tasks, and that no matter how they were bent and beaten, no matter how more trials lay ahead, they have not broken.

They are, here and together, the same boys they ever were.

Will laughs and draws his hips from the straw-stuffed mattress when Hannibal’s hands spread up Will’s chest and he holds his cock suspended between his lips. He thumbs firmly across his nipples and Will aches his pleasure out in a helpless moan. The sweet sucking pressure, the heat, the wetness of Hannibal’s mouth scatters Will’s heartbeats erratic.

The sight of him bowed this way, as Will peeks from beneath his arm, is enough to nearly unravel him entirely. “God, you’re beautiful,” Will whispers, voice made rough snared so tight in his throat. “Look at you.”

Hannibal, in answer, looks up, and Will nearly loses it right there.

But Hannibal knows how to read his body, now. He knows when to pull back and when to push Will further. He has played at bringing his friend again and again to the cusp of climax and stopping before he can spill over, to Will’s displeasure at the time and utter contentment at the end. Stubborn, beautiful thing.

After enough reprieve is given that Will’s breathing evens once more, Hannibal swallows him deeper, as far as he can to the back of his throat, swallowing around him over and over before letting Will go, pulling back to catch his breath and watch. Will’s hands are shaking, his sides heaving in quick bursts of breath that each sound like the weakest, sweetest laugh Hannibal’s ever heard. He brings his fingers down to stroke himself but Hannibal merely curls them in his own hand, grinning when Will swears at him for this, too.

“You gonna keep me here all goddamn day?”

“I may.”

“Some of us have work to do.”

“You removed my shirt first.”

“Should’ve left you in the swamp,” Will grins, pulling Hannibal down atop himself and slipping a hand between their bodies to grasp both in tandem and tug.

Hannibal purrs his delight at the new development and kisses against Will’s cheek and jaw and down to his throat as he rocks down against him. It is a slow pleasure, a delightful tease, and both grow increasingly more breathless. It is a hot day outside but within their little home it is hotter still, breath mingling, lips leaving warm smears against skin and lips and hair and anywhere they can reach.

It is wonderful. It is intoxicating.

“I love you,” Hannibal informs Will with a smile, a nuzzle against him. “And I am going to undo you, and take my sweet time enjoying it.”

Will stretches and tilts his head aside, cheek against his shoulder and smile spread wide. Beneath his friend’s scandalous words and physical affection, pressed humid against his throat, Will unfurls in languid thrusts. Hannibal’s spit slicks the friction smooth between them. Squeezed firm together, they find familiar rhythm driving into the tight tunnel of Will’s fingers.

In the other’s eyes, they are beautiful. Their scars are things of glory. Their hardened bodies the softest place that they can fall. Will all but preens under Hannibal’s attention now, and Hannibal finds himself spreading wider above him, to let Will lavish adoration on the size and strength of him.

Will thumbs across his friend’s foreskin and delights when he shudders weak. Hannibal grasps Will’s jaw in his hand and turns his head aside to suckle his pulse. Faster Will strokes them, squeezing and rounding his wrist to corkscrew down their cocks. Quicker they pant, pressing sweat-slick chests together to feel the other’s heart hammer towards their own.

“Let me,” Will laughs. “Let me, now, and you can tease later. Please - there’s time.”

“You always say that,” Hannibal murmurs, but he doesn’t stop Will’s hand, he doesn’t slow it, setting his own fingers against his wrist just to feel the movement there. He can’t fault Will his hope, though, and the truth in his words.

There is time. 

They have that time.

Together, between them, to share and use as they would. There is no clock by which their lives run anymore, no responsibilities hanging heavy on their shoulders. Nothing at all.

“Come on then,” Hannibal tells him, barely keeping his voice steady. “Impatient boy, come on.”

Will’s throat jerks when he swallows, lips blossoming wide with a heavy groan as he stills his hand and squeezes hard. Spilling seed against their damp stomachs, he bucks shuddering and breathless tries to close his lips against Hannibal’s own. Instead his mouth is captured by his friend, smiles spread wide as Hannibal relaxes and loses himself to this in turn.

They will lay together, messy and sated, and trace fingers through their release to spread it with youthful delight against the other’s skin. They will fall asleep too close, and wake up when the sun passes overhead, too warm to keep so near. They will wrestle towards and away from each other, sputtering laughter and curses and love, and make their way to the crick to rinse clean and cool off.

Hannibal will dive beneath to seek out the little crawfish and bring them back for Will to cook. Will will snap the creatures and feed Hannibal from his fingertips. They will together survey the garden, and work side by side until the day grows dark. Side by side, they’ll touch and rut and kiss and sleep, safe now in a way they could not have been before.

The sun will rise again.

There is time.

And this time is theirs.


End file.
